Clouds, Rain, and Storms

If into each life some rain must fall, we might as well have some fun with it. Try making a cloud in a bottle or baking a thunder cake. See below for fiction and nonfiction books, poems, projects, experiments, recipes, and arts and crafts, all having to do with clouds and rain.

CLOUD AND RAIN STORIES

	Robert Kalan’s Rain (Greenwillow Books, 1991) is as much about colors as rain, beginning with “Blue sky,” “Yellow sun,” and “White clouds.” Then the sky turns gray and rain falls – and finally there’s a wonderful multicolored rainbow. For ages 2-5.
	Also see Colors.
	In Eric Carle’s Little Cloud (Philomel, 1996), Little Cloud changes itself into a handful of different shapes – a sheep, a tree, a bunny, an airplane – before joining in with the other clouds to make a rainstorm. For ages 2-6.
	In Manya Stojic’s Rain (Dragonfly Books, 2009), rain finally comes to the hot dry African savanna. The porcupine smells it first, and runs to tell the zebras, who see distant lightning. They rush to tell the baboons, who hear thunder; then the rhinoceros feels the first falling drops. Both a rain story and an exploration of the five senses for ages 3-7.
	In Charlotte Zolotow’s The Storm Book (HarperCollins, 1989) – a Caldecott Honor book – it’s a hot summer day in the country when a storm sweeps in, and then retreats, leaving behind a beautiful rainbow. For ages 3-7.
	Charles Shaw’s It Looked Like Spilt Milk (HarperCollins, 1988) is a collection of splotchy white shapes on a dark blue background, with an attention-grabbing refrain: “Sometimes it looked like a Rabbit. But it wasn’t a Rabbit./Sometimes it looked like a Bird. But it wasn’t a Bird.”) On the last page, readers find out just was it is: a floating white cloud. For ages 3-8.
	In David Shannon’s The Rain Came Down (Blue Sky Press), the rain makes everybody cross. The chickens squawk, the cat yowls, the dog barks, people yell, and in no time the entire neighborhood is squabbling – all to the refrain of “the rain came down.” Then (!) the rain stops, the sun comes out, and soon all problems are magically resolved. For ages 3-8.
	Linda Ashman’s picture book Rain! (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) combines two very different takes on the weather – that of a disgruntled old man (“Nasty galoshes!” “Dang puddles!”) and that of an exuberant little kid pretending to be a frog. A charmer for ages 4-7.
	In David Wiesner’s Sector 7 (Clarion Books, 1999) – a Caldecott Honor Book – a little boy on a visit to the Empire State Building befriends a cloud and is carried off to the Cloud Dispatch Center in the sky, responsible for Sector 7 which encompasses New York City. There he discovers that the clouds are unhappy with their strictly regulated shapes and sizes, and so sets out to remedy the matter, turning them into a marvelous variety of fantastic shapes. For ages 4-8.
	In “Clouds” – one of the short clever stories in Arnold Lobel’s Mouse Tales (HarperCollins, 1978) – a little mouse enjoys watching the changing shapes of clouds until, to his horror, a cloud takes the shape of an enormous cat. For ages 4-8.
	Also see Nice Mice and Awesome Rats.
	Uri Shulevitch’s Rain Rain Rivers (Square Fish, 2006) is a lyrical celebration of rain, beginning with a little girl sitting in her attic bedroom listening to rain on the roof. For ages 4-8.
	In Rob Scotton’s The Rain is a Pain (HarperCollins, 2012), Splat the Cat is happily trying out his new purple rollerskates when a determined and annoying cloud moves in. For ages 4-8.
	For more cat resources (all kinds), see Cats.
	In Tom Lichtenheld’s Cloudette (Henry Holt and Company, 2011), the title character is a very small and adorable cloud. Being small has many advantages, but Cloudette sees how bigger clouds behave, watering crops and filling waterfalls and rivers, and she wants to make a difference too. And finally she does, for one small unhappy frog. For ages 4-8.
	In James Stevenson’s We Hate Rain! (Greenwillow Books, 1988), Louie and Mary Ann are fretting because it has rained for two days straight, so Grandpa tells a tale from his youth when he, his brother Wainey, and family were deluged in a truly spectacular rain that filled their Victorian house to the roof. Like all Stevenson books, it’s clever and hilarious. It’s also infuriatingly out of print; check your local library. It’s also available from used-book suppliers. For ages 4-8.
	In Judi Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Atheneum, 1978), the village of Chewandswallow gets its food three times a day from the weather – it rains, snows, and blows orange juice, mashed potatoes, and hamburgers. Then, suddenly, the food-bearing weather turns vicious. For ages 4-8.
	Also see the sequel, Pickles to Pittsburgh.
	The film version of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is 90 minutes long and rated PG.
	In Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck (Random House, 1949), King Derwin is bored with rain, snow, and fog, and so demands that the royal magicians (“mystic men who eat boiled owls”) create something new and different to fall from the sky. They produce a disastrous storm of gooey green oobleck, and it’s up to the king’s commonsensical page boy, Bartholomew, to solve the problem. For ages 4-9.
	From Scientific American, It’s a Solid…It’s a Liquid…It’s Oobleck! has a recipe for making your own oobleck and an explanation of why it behaves the way it does.
	In Michael Catchpool’s The Cloud Spinner (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2012), a young boy can weave beautiful cloth from clouds: “gold in the morning with the rising sun, white in the afternoon, and crimson in the evening” and “soft as a mouse’s touch and warm as roasted chestnuts,” He’s always careful, though, never to weave too much, having been taught by his mother that “enough is enough, and not one stitch more.” Then the king discovers the wonderful cloth and demands more and more of it – until the kingdom is at risk of losing its clouds, with awful consequences for all. Luckily the wise young princess intervenes. A lovely ecological tale for ages 5-8.
	In David Wisniewski’s Rain Player (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995), the land is threatened with a drought, so Pik, a young Mayan boy, challenges Chac, the rain god, to a game of ball. With wonderful Mayan-style cut-paper illustrations. For ages 5-9.