George Buys a Kite

Everyone in the country is excited about Allie's big dance party. Everyone, that is except Bill, who wants to avoid going to the party because he can't dance. George sees Mr. and Mrs. Renkins practicing the box step for the dance and that's when he decides that all he needs to do is teach Bill to dance. But George can't seem to figure out how to teach Bill unable to speak. That's when he decides that maybe, if a map can tell you how to get someplace, maybe he can make one to tell Bill and the others who also want to dance. All he has to do is figure out how to design the map to show which foot is left and right, which steps are small and big, and where to move your feet.

Chef Pisghetti has some new friends outside the kitchen, the four hens Eeney, Meeney, Miney, and Freckles, so he can have the freshest eggs possible to use for his food. But the only problem is, his new hens don't seem to be making any. George decides to stay with the chickens overnight in their coop to see what is making them unhappy and soon finds out. Being in the middle of the noisy city, the chicken coop can be very noisy at night, keeping the chickens awake and making them tired. George decides to keep the chickens somewhere else less noisy. When he tries the library and they manage to lay a few eggs, he figures out what to do. All he needs to do is soundproof the chicken coop. There are a lot of materials George can use in his apartment building's recycling room, but he just needs to figure out which ones work the best, for the soundproofing and the chickens.

While flying their kite one day in the country, George and Bill are forced to buy a new kite after it is destroyed in a freak accident. George and Bill find a fancy new kite at Ada and Luke's General Store and decide to place it on layaway until they can get enough money to buy it. Bill and George decide to form a task force to earn enough money to buy the kite. They then have to decide the most efficient order to perform the tasks in and how much time to spend on each. The one thing George later realizes they forgot was to plan their jobs according to the weather, with indoor jobs on rainy or windy days and outdoor jobs on sunny days.

One of George's favorite things to do in the city is visit Mabel's Department Store, because there are so many things to do. One day while The Man With the Yellow Hat is doing his shopping George sees something he never has before, a moving light in the shape of a train, and soon discovers that a lamp with a rotating shade is making it. Fascinated by the light, George decides to make his own moving light for home, but when he stays at the store too long to find out how he winds up locked in after hours. With nothing else to do, George decides to make his own moving light right in the store.

George and Marco are attending their first-ever auction in the city. The Man has to explain to George that in an auction you don't buy the items, you bid on them. And the person with the highest bid at the end wins the item. George has been given a dollar to bid on whatever he wants and he winds up bidding on and winning a pair of red mittens. Unfortunately, George later finds out that the mittens cost $101.00 not $1.00. Without the money to pay for the mittens, he has to re-auction them. Nobody at the auction seems to want the mittens but George remembers that Mr. Glass had his eyes on the same mittens.

George, the Man, Aunt Margret, and Steve are going to see one of Betsy's favorite operas, Hansel & Gretel, but Betsy has to stay home because she has the chickenpox. When George sees the opera, he really enjoys it and feels sorry for Betsy having missed it. So, since he had gotten a copy of the music from the opera, he decides to recreate it for Betsy. He soon finds out he has trouble playing all the parts, so he decides to make sock puppets of all the characters and draw the scenery. Now all George has to do is find a way to control the scenery as well as the characters.

Steve & George are busy making a map of the city while Betsy is doing a little experimenting with Professor Wismean's new micro-sized camera. After Steve loses his marker under the sofa, he decides to put the camera on his pet hamster, Hoagie. He places Hoagie on the couch but he winds up running out the door of the apartment and outside. George and Steve now have to find him. George takes the map they have made of the city and goes outside on a look for the hamster with Steve watching the cam on the computer and telling George where to go. Only problem is, George can't tell his left from his right-literally.

George is too excited to nap! Chef Pisghetti is showing a Basil Know-it-all detective movie! Basil is George's favorite detective of all time. Upon arriving at the restaurant, George discovers a mystery of his own. Chef Pisghetti's recipe book is missing from its usual spot on the shelf. Because of missing his nap, George falls asleep during the movie but remembers a scene where Basil used a vase as a magnifying glass. In his dream, George does not have a vase but he can fill a plastic bag with water and round it up like a balloon. After waking up having missed most of the movie, George tries to solve the mystery of the missing cookbook but he does not have a magnifying glass or a bag that can be filled and twisted without it leaking.

It has just rained in the country and Bill is having some trouble throwing newspapers due to a sprained thumb. When Allie and George see an article in the paper about a giant statue of a dog, they decide to make one as a tribute to Bill's thumb. They cannot seem to find the right building materials. George does not have enough clay, shaving cream is too runny, and peanut butter is too sticky. Eventually, with the recent rain, they try to make a statue out of mud. But they can't seem to get the mud to hold its shape.

George always has the time to stop for a good picture with his friend The Man With the Yellow Hat. When Betsy takes his picture, she says she is entering a children's photography contest. Her pictures all have a basic shape hidden somewhere in them. She takes George to her apartment and shows him how she downloads the pictures on to her computer and prints them out. After a freak accident, Steve winds up destroying all of her pictures. So he sends George to take new ones while he distracts Betsy. George remembers how all of the pictures have a basic shape and must find those shapes to get those pictures.

Something unique is coming to the roof of George's Apartment Building-a symphony made out of wind put on by Mr. Zoobel and sponsored by Mr. Glass. The only propblem is that Mr. Zoobel does not know how to put on a wind symphony. Mr. Zoobel wants a loud "Bong!", a long "Whoo", a "Tink-tink-tink", and lastly a nice "Snap!", and George may be just the monkey to help. All he needs are ordinary household objects, and wind.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in the country, George and The Man normally wash the cars, The Man's big car and all of George's toy cars. But today they are doing something a little different and getting the car washed, at the country town's new automatic car wash. George and Allie are fascinated by how the car wash works and how it pulls the car through a line of different operations in a set order. When they get home, George and Allie decide to build an automatic car wash of their own to wash George's toy cars.

One morning in the city, a breakfast mishap leads to a mess of food all over the floor of the apartment. The Man leaves George to clean it up before ants come into the apartment because "Once ants come into an apartment you can never get rid of them." Sure, enough, George finds one ant, then two, then an entire army, and Hundley's quest for a clean hallway leads him into George's apartment. Now George and Hundley have to work together to find how to get rid of the ants without hurting them and stop more ants from coming. Turns out, they discover that ants are scavngers-they will constantly move to find food, no matter where it is.

It's a winter morning in the country, the perfect time for pancakes, but George and The Man seem to be out of syrup! The Man tells George that syrup comes from trees, but not growing ON them, growing IN them! You just have to tap the trees. Unfortunately George and Allie cannot get any syrup to come out no matter how hard they tap the trees. Then Mr. Renkins shows them that to tap a tree you need a few tools and a small hole in the tree, and once you do that, a small liquid starts dripping out of the tree. But this liquid is gray and very bitter, not like syrup, because as Mr. Renkins explains, it is sap, and needs to be boiled into syrup.

George and The Man With the Yellow Hat are excited because The Man's favorite jazz musician, Bonnie Smooth is coming to town and Howlin' Hal, the DJ at the local radio station is giving out front-row tickets to her concert. George and The Man win the tickets and go to the local radio station to claim them, where Howlin' Hal shows George how the radio station works. In a mishap, George winds up locked inside the DJ room with Howlin' Hal and The Man locked out and Bonnie Smooth about to call in to the station to debut her new song! The two need to find a way for George to take the call and broadcast it.

George, The Man With the Yellow Hat, and Mr. and Mrs. Quint are going to the desert to dig for fossils. When they arrive, George meets an Indian chief named John, who shows him how he paints out of desert sand colored with natural chemicals. John paints a picture of George in the sand but a few bunnies come and eat his painting! After John leaves to help The Man and Mr. Quint, George decides to make his own sand paint and paint his own picture. George soon finds that all the sand in the desert is the same shade of light brown, but he discovers how fruits and vegetables can be used to color the sand. He also needs to make sure that the sand is dry so it can flow from his hands. Once he figures out the recipe for good colored sand paint, he just needs to find a way to stop it from blowing away in the desert sand, and to make it bunny-proof.

Chef Pisghetti has a problem and it has stopped him from cooking his pasta al dente, Gnocchi seems to be running away from the restaurant during the day for no reason at all, and it began after the chef did some cleaning up around the place to stop her from scratching a few items, including the restaurant's wooden back door. George decides to follow her around to see where she is going all day and every day. He finds Gnocchi at a shipyard scratching bags of rice, the park scratching a tree, dump scratching cardboard, the construction site scratching a painted canvas and a Mexican restaurant scratching a menu board, which has the chef worried that Gnocchi now prefers Mexican food. George later discovers that all the things she has been scratching feel the same as a few items the chef threw out, so he needs to create a new area of items that feel the same so she can stay around the restaurant.

George and Marco have gone on vacation with Professor Wiseman and The Man with the Yellow Hat to the beach. They have all come for a vacation on the beach as well as to observe the tides and the tidal pools. Professor Wiseman explains to George and Marco that in ancient times, items left on the beach had been buried by the tides almost like buried treasure, leaving George and Marco to try to bury a box of treasure on the beach themselves, including Marco's favorite toy, Silverwolf, a small silver plastic wolf. They later decide to locate and dig up the treasure but they can't seem to find it, and the water is deeper than it was before. They also get distracted by a friendly and playful dolphin in the water. They later see how the tides constantly change the shore and how they are always moving, even surfacing the treasure they couldn't find before.

It is Pretty City Day in the Big City. George is a member of Steve's pod, a group of people that will help clean up the city, and his group has been assigned to clean up George's street! The winner gets their face on a poster. George begins his work cleaning the city but a lot of the things he sees being thrown out are amazing, too amazing to put in the trash. When he decides to bring those things home, he winds up with more keepsakes than trash! That's when The Man With the Yellow Hat explains that a collection is made up of things that are related or the same, like his collection of pig sculptures. Now George has to decide what to keep and what kinds of the same things to keep.

It is a record-setting winter in the country-one of the coldest in recent years! Even Jumpy, normally an outdoor animal has to find refuge in George and The Man's Country House. The Man himself finds though, that the country house seems to be extra cold. He then finds that the house has several small holes in the walls, and others areas where cold air, and the occasional squirrel can leak in. He decides that he needs to insulate the house, because insulation is designed to keep a house warm, and unfortunately, sealing up all those holes makes Jumpy unwelcome. Feeling sorry for him, George decides to make a fully insulated house for Jumpy that will keep him warm and happy all winter.