What's That Falling From the Sky?!

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Written by Judi Barrett

Illustrated by Ron Barrett

Published by Scholastic 1978

32 Pages

Modern Fantasty

            Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is one of my favorite books, so of course I wanted to share it with everyone. One of the main reasons I love this book is because of the amazing details in the illustrations. I could sit and look at the illustrations for hours. I also love the imagination that was put into the story. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is introduced with two young children being told a bedtime story by their grandfather. He tells them about a little town called Chewandswallow. Everything is normal in this small town except one thing. The town does not have any food stores. That is because they don’t really need any because they get their food from a different source. Their weather is a little different as well. It rains three times a day in the town of Chewandswallow. Could the weather possibly be related to the food situation?

            The illustrations in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs are flawless. There is so much depth to each picture. Each picture has a white boarder surrounding them. I believe that the border helps them pop out even more than they already do. Ron Barrett draws his pictures in black and uses watercolor painting to add color to them. His pictures have so much texture to them you can imagine the look and feel if the things in them were real. Although the text is very descriptive about what is going on in the story the illustrations add so much character to the story. The pictures are so descriptive; they could tell the story alone if there were no words.

            The age level this story is appropriate for it ages four to eight. This story is good for readers in pre-k through third grade. There are tons of fun activities that you could do to incorporate with this story. A fun writing activity you could do is choose a page(s) and have the kids write dialogue in conversation bubbles for the characters. You could teach begin by teaching the students about dialogue and how to use it correctly. A science lesson you could teach using this boat is about things that float or sink and why. At the end of the story the people leave the city by rafts made of bread. Have the students choose different objects that could be used as rafts and see if they will sink or float in water. Another thing you could do with this book is have the students the students separate foods into graphs to determine what foods are healthy or unhealthy. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the year.