Title: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Author: Judi Barrett
Illustrator: Ron Barrett
Summary
This week´s theme of Fantasy is my favorite of all. When it comes to my own peresonal interests regarding reading, I tend to always go toward this genre. For this weeks children´s book, I chose to review a beloved staple in my early childhood classroom. ¨Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs¨ by Judi Barrett has been a comical, and engaging story, that I´ve shared with my classes throughout the years. The funny story along with the engaging art always maintains my students interest and keeps them laughing the whole time. I recently shared the read aloud with my three son´s at home on Youtube. They thoroughly enjoyed the funny story. The story begins with a normal family being cooked breakfast by their grandfather. The gradfather gets a little wild with flipping his pancakes. This event inspires the grandfather to tell his grandchildren a bedtime a silly bedtime story over the town of Chewandswallow. The town of Chewandswallow is like a regular town. However, in place of regular weather, food falls down from the sky to supply them with daily meals. The town has a great sanitation routine in place, and seems happy with the situation. The story provides the readers with examples of full course meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that falls down from the sky. The illustrations of this book really brings the book to life, and will make you giggle. Everything is well, until one day the sizes of the food coming down begin to grow dramatically in size. From their the ¨weather¨ seems to go bonkers. The food no longer makes sense and become a danger of sorts to the town´s people. The people of the community eventually have to flee the area, and leave the crazy town of Chewandswallow for good. The story then ends the grandchildren waking up to snow falling at their house and going sledding with their grandfather. While sledding, they happen to notice that the big snow covered hill reminded them of a big pile of mashed potatoes with the sun at the top looking like butter.
Classroom Activities
The cute children´s book ¨Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs¨ provides many fun educational activity for children. I have read this book with my students throughout the years many a time, and it has always been a hit. If I were to teach a lesson around this book, I think I would first read the story and then open up a whole group discussion with my students over what their favorite foods were and what they would like to rain down from the sky. I could also venture over to having the students generate ideas of what they would do if food rained down from the sky. Ask them questions such as how would they clean up the mess, would they want it to keep doing it and if not, how would they get it to stop. This could turn into a very cute guided writing assignment over the topic. Teacherspayteachers.com has many cute art ideas over the book. My favorite activity that I found costs about five dollars to purchase, but has a guided writing prompt paper with a craft that has a big cloud with an assortment of food that you color and cut out that hangs from it. Down beliow in the reference section, will be a link with this adorable activity. This book inspired the making of a major motion picture. The movie varies a little bit from the actual story, but is entertaining and kids love it as well because of it´s comical nature. Personally I enjoy the true storyline from the book, but showing the movie after reading the story could generate some meaningful discussions over how motion pictures sometime differentiate from the original plot line. Overall I strongly recommend this book as a staple for any earlychildhood classroom. Many older elementary students enjoy the silliness of the story as well.
References
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs | Activities | Mini Read Aloud Unit. (n.d.). TPT. Retrieved July 4, 2024, from https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Cloudy-with-a-Chance-of-Meatballs-Activities-Mini-Read-Aloud-Unit-6638131?st=3cc5bb3b011b9365d5a52f63facf4cfd
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