When seven-year-old Bean plays a mean trick on her sister, she finds unexpected support for her antics from Ivy, the new neighbor, who is less boring than Bean first suspected.

Everyone in second grade seems set on breaking a world record and friends Ivy and Bean are no exception, deciding to become the youngest people ever to discover a dinosaur skeleton.

Everyone in second grade seems set on breaking a world record and friends Ivy and Bean are no exception, deciding to become the youngest people ever to discover a dinosaur skeleton.

Best friends Ivy and Bean learn that being very good, or very bad, can be a real challenge when they set out to become like a man Ivy heard about who was so pure of heart that birds and animals followed him.

When Bean's parents leave her in the care of her older sister Nancy for the afternoon, she enlists her neighbor and best friend Ivy to come over and teach Nancy how to be a really good babysitter.

Second-grade best friends Ivy and Bean beg for ballet lessons, then, when they are cast as squids in their first recital, scheme to find a way out of what seems to be boring, hard, and potentially embarrassing.

"It's the Science Fair, and the second grade is all over it! Some kids are making man-eating robots. Some kids are holding their breath for a very, very long time. Some kids are doing interesting things with vacuum cleaners. The theme, obviously, is global warming. But what should Ivy and Bean do? Something involving explosions? Or ropes? Something with ice cubes? Or maybe . . . maybe something different." --From the publisher.

"Ivy and Bean decide to write a newspaper in order to buy some special cheese, but their sweep through the neighborhood leads to interesting stories and even more interesting reactions after their neighbors read it."

Seven-year-old Bean is too young to go to the camp her sister Nancy is attending, so she and her best friend Ivy decide to create their own camp.

After watching a movie about a detective on the television, Bean decides to set up shop as a private investigator--and she and Ivy start looking for mysteries to solve.