By Tomie dePaola
The little book that gives your child the names of the ten kinds of clouds, so the next time they look up they can tell you exactly what they're seeing.
Tomie dePaola takes the sky your child is already staring at and hands them the words for it. Ten kinds of clouds, drawn in his round, friendly way, each with its real name and what it tends to mean: the fair-weather cirrus streaks up high, the piled-up cumulus of a good afternoon, the low gray stratus that sits on a whole day, and the towering cumulonimbus that means a storm is coming. Then it turns to the old sayings and stories people made up about clouds before anyone knew the science, red sky at night, a cloud that looks like a castle, and it ends on a small joke about the clouds themselves. It's short, it's warm, and it turns a blank sky into something a child can read.
A child who loves weather usually starts with the sky, because it's the one part of weather they can see any day without a storm turning up. This book meets them exactly there. It's small enough to finish in a sitting, the drawings make the ten cloud types easy to tell apart, and the naming is the whole gift: it changes a child from someone who watches clouds into someone who knows them. It's the calmest possible way into the obsession, with nothing dramatic in it, just the everyday sky made readable.