The Cloud Book by Tomie dePaola and Weather by Seymour Simon

The Cloud Book by Tomie dePaola

In this book, dePaola gives descriptions, illustrations and even other slang names commonly used with all different kinds of clouds. In the beginning he starts with the three main types: cirrus, cumulus, and stratus. Tomie dePaola explains then what makes a cloud one of these types and where they are in the sky. The illustrations are fun and interesting, and I think kids would be able to find in the sky the main three types of clouds after reading this! The second part of the book consists of many other varieties of clouds that stem from the three main types. He briefly talks about how clouds are regarded in a few other cultures and in the past. There are a variety of sayings and idioms that farmers, travelers, villagers, sailor, etc and ones that we still use today like, “she has her head in the clouds.” In the end there is a silly story about a cloud coming into a room to show how clouds expand in an area and then a helpful index of the cloud types and page numbers!
Kindergarten-First Grade Level reading it aloud.

Weather by Seymour Simon

This book goes into great detail about our atmosphere, what happens there, how we get different weather patterns and is at too high of a level for first grade, but I think I could still use this book because of its many amazing photographs of weather all over the world. I think that we could discuss, using simple language, what he is talking about in the text. He also includes some great new vocabulary that the children would not be very familiar with such as atmosphere, equator, South Pole, North Pole and continent that may help to learn in our unit on weather. There is also another book by the same author called Lightning that is much of the same kind of thing.
Fourth-Fifth Grade Reading Level