Little Cloud By: Eric Carle

Book Genre: Fiction

Publishing Info: Philomel, 6th Print Edition (33 pages)

Awards and honors received: None found, surprisingly.

Summary: Little Cloud, by Eric Carle is written very simplistic with clear text and images as he tells the story of Little Cloud. Little Cloud strays away from his friends and entertains himself by changing into many different objects (lamb, airplane, shark, clown, etc.) before joining the others to form one big cloud that rains.

Personal rating and reason for rating: ***Good. I enjoyed reading this book and would use it when teaching about clouds in my weather unit. Most of the books in our library about clouds are a little too advice for kindergarten, so that is why I liked this book. I also liked how this book would make the children use their imagination and spark creativity. I would defiantly use this book in my classroom and suggest it to other teachers for young children.

Reading level: 2.2 (second grade, second month)

Interest level: Pre-K through 2

Possible uses of the text in integrated units of study:

Art: After reading this book I would complete a painting activity with the students in small groups. Idea 1: I would give them each a blue sheet of paper and let them use a paint brush or fingers to create a cloud like the ones in the story. This would let the children pick what type of cloud they wanted to paint. Idea 2: Let the student make a design on one side of the blue paper. I would then fold it (to make a symmetrical design) and students would have to look at it and use their imagination to tell me what their cloud looks like. I think Idea 2 would be more fun but you could do either or.

Writing: The art project from above would tie right into writing. After children have discovered/or chosen what their cloud looks like they would have to write a sentence about their cloud. For example: My cloud looks like a flower. (This sentence uses many of their sight words) I would display their art work with their sentence underneath on a bulletin board in my classroom.

Science: On a cloudy day students could take their science journals outside. They could study the clouds and see if they could interpret what some of the clouds looked like. They would need to draw a picture of what the cloud looks like and label underneath.

Reading: We could do a K-W-L chart about what they already know about clouds. Since this book does not give much actual information about clouds, we could use the internet to complete research if need be. I would read this book through once and then we would go back and find all of our sight words and circle them with a sticky strip. Also, we would take any new words and add them to our word wall.

Potential problems or difficulties: I do not see any potential problems.