No Jumping on the Bed! is a children's book

Children's literature

Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...

 written and illustrated by Tedd Arnold

Tedd Arnold

Tedd Arnold is a children's book writer and illustrator. He has written over 50 books, and he has won the "Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor" for his book "Hi! Fly Guy!". He currently lives in Elmira, New York, United States. He worked as a commercial illustrator before beginning his career writing...

. Published in 1987, it marked the first of the many children's books that Arnold was to both write and illustrate. No Jumping on the Bed! won the 1988 International Reading Association

International Reading Association

The International Reading Association is an international professional organization that was created in 1956 to improve reading instruction, facilitate dialogue about research on reading, and encourage the habit of reading....

/Children's Book Council Children's Choice Award, the Georgia Children's Picture Storybook Award in 1990, and the Volunteer State Book Award in 1992. The book is aimed at 4-7 year olds and written in humorous rhyming

Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...

 prose, similar in style to that of Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss

Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen names Dr. Seuss, Theo LeSieg and, in one case, Rosetta Stone....

 whom Arnold acknowledges as a major influence on his work. It tells the story of Walter, a little boy whose father has told not to jump up and down on his bed. Walter dreams that he has ignored his father's warning with disastrous results. He and his bed fall through all seven floors of his apartment building, taking with them all the neighbors in the floors below.

Arnold's inspiration for the story came when he and his young family moved from Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

 to an old apartment building in Yonkers, New York

Yonkers, New York

Yonkers is the fourth most populous city in the state of New York , and the most populous city in Westchester County, with a population of 195,976...

. His son Walter, for whom the protagonist is named, was four years old at the time and loved jumping on his bed. As Arnold writes:

"But Walter's bedroom floor was someone else's ceiling! The whole idea of apartment living was new to me back then. People living upstairs. More people living downstairs! New experiences like that seem to spark my imagination."

Arnold's oft-repeated warning to his son of "No jumping on the bed!" became the title of the book.

Synopsis

Walter's father finds him jumping on his bed and warns him not to do it: "One day it’ll crash right through the floor." Walter tries to go to sleep but hears his friend Delbert in the apartment above jumping on his bed. Walter decides to have just one more jump himself, but instead keeps jumping higher and higher until the floor starts to crack. He and his bed fall into Miss Hattie’s apartment where he lands in her plate of spaghetti and meatballs

Spaghetti and meatballs

Spaghetti with meatballs is a dish that usually consists of spaghetti, tomato sauce and meatballs.According to Food Network host and correspondent Alton Brown, early 20th-century Italian immigrants in New York City were the first to make it and the National Pasta Association was the...

.

Walter and his bed continue to fall, along with Miss Hattie and the spaghetti, into Mr. Matty's apartment where he is watching monsters on his television set. Miss Hattie falls into Mr. Matty's lap, while Walter lands in his fish tank. The next stop for Walter's bed and the ever-growing crowd is Aunt Batty's apartment where her stamp collection gets scattered all over the floor. Aunt Batty and her stamps join the group as it falls into the next apartment, knocking over a castle of toy blocks that Patty and Natty have been building. Patty, Natty, and Fatty (their cat) are added to the group as it falls down into Mr. Hanratty's apartment where he is painting a picture at his easel. Walter, Miss Hattie, Mr. Matty, Aunt Batty, Patty and Natty, Mr. Hanratty, the cat, the paint, the spaghetti, the television, the fish, and various toys now land in Maestro

Maestro

Maestro is a title of extreme respect given to a master musician. The term is most commonly used in the context of Western classical music and opera. This is associated with the ubiquitous use of Italian vocabulary for classical music terms...

 Ferlingatti's apartment where he and his string quartet

String quartet

A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...

 are practicing. They too join the tumbling crowd who all end up safely in the dark and quiet basement of the building.

Walter is back in his bed and realizes that it has all been a dream, but he promises himself that he will never jump on his bed again and hopes that Delbert will learn his lesson as well. Then Walter hears Delbert jumping on the bed again, followed shortly by Delbert falling through Walter's ceiling.

Characters (in order of appearance)

• Walter
• Walter's father
• Miss Hattie
• Mr. Matty
• Aunt Batty
• Patty and Natty and their cat Fatty
• Mr. Hanratty
• Maestro Ferlingatti
• Delbert, Walter's friend

Bibliographic information

• Tedd Arnold, No Jumping on the Bed!, New York: Dial Books for Young Readers
  Penguin Group
  The Penguin Group is a trade book publisher, the largest in the world , having overtaken Random House in 2009. The Penguin Group is the name of the incorporated division of parent Pearson PLC that oversees these publishing operations...
  
  , 1987. Illustrated by Tedd Arnold, 32 pages. ISBN 0803700385
• Tedd Arnold, No Se Salta en la Cama!, (Spanish language
  Spanish language
  Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
  
   edition, translated by Osvaldo Blanco), New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, Penguin Ediciones, 1997. Illustrated by Tedd Arnold, 32 pages. ISBN 0803720688

There have been 14 later editions of the book in English, including a board book

Board book

A board book is a type of book printed on thick paperboard. The paperboard is printed and used for both the cover and the interior pages. Each page panel is a minimum of two plies of paperboard thickness. Unlike a typical paper book that is bound with saddle stitching or perfect binding, a...

 with simplified text for very young children. (Imprint

Imprint

In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...

s for the later editions include Puffin

Penguin Books

Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

 and Scholastic Inc.).

External links

• Tedd Arnold's official web site. Accessed 24 September 2010.
• Book review and lesson plans based on No Jumping on the Bed! (Ryan Sinclair, Reading Is Good: Book reviews for elementary educators.) Accessed 25 September 2008.