Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

By: Judy Barret

Illustrated by: Ron Barret

Grades: P-2

Where you live does is rain rain? Does it snow snow? Or does it rain orange juice and snow mashed potatoes? What about the wind? Is that just air or does it bring along some hamburgers as well? Have you ever seen a pancake as big as a school building and topped with syrup? Well when you read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, in the town named Chewandswallow, it all happens there.

In the beginning of this book two young children and waiting for their grandpa to make them pancakes for breakfast when on of the pancakes falls right on Henrys head. Next thing you see is them eating breakfast and then waiting to be read a bed time story my their grandpa. Grandpa tells the children about the small town of Chewandswallow. Where the weather came three times a day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The weather in this town was very different than what you would expect though. Their wither brought food! From raining orange juice, milk, and syrup to snowing mashed potatoes and peas and having windstorms bring in hamburgers. This is how the people of Chewandswallow ate, the brought their knives, plates, forks, cups, spoons, and napkins with them at all times to they would be ready to eat whatever fell from the sky. The town even has a sanitation department that cleans up the food that falls on roofs of sidewalks. They feed dogs, cats, whales, fish, and turtles with the food that they clean up. They even use the extra food in their soil to grow flowers. Then one day the food falling from the sky began to get out of control. One day only cheese fell from the sky, another only over cooked broccoli, then brussel sprouts with peanut butter and mayonnaise and even a fog of pea soup. Soon the weather was so out of control there was a bread hurricane for a whole day and night and the a huge pancake landed on the school and they had to cancel it! There was a day filled with ice cream and jelly and cheese sandwiches and even a salt and pepper wind with a tomato tornado. Soon the food falling from the sky was too much for the sanitation department and the people of Chewandswallow to handle. They made rafts out of the oversized bread, took the necessities, and sailed to a new town. They made temporary homes out of their bread and  had to learn how to buy and cook their own food. No one ever went back to Chewandswallow again. The story now goes back to the children and their grandfather they go to bed and when they wake up their is snow outside. When they go sledding with grandpa they think they see a giant pat of butter at the top of the hill and can ever mell mashed potatoes.

Everything in this fantasy adds up. From the people eating the weather to is getting to be too much to leaving and having to go somewhere else and now make their own food. The author makes the child suspend disbelief by having the people of Chewandswallow have a full story from how they started with their “normal” weather to how if became out of control and they had to leave the town to save their lives. The characters start off outside of the fantasy and the fantasy begins when their grandpa starts to tell hi story. Not many people would believe that real food would fall from the sky, especially in meal form. The language for this story works because you can tell what is happening and it explains that town very well. The author makes sure you know that the town of Chewandswallow is not the town that the children live in. She makes sure that she give good description to the places around the town and how they operate. This theme is worthwhile for imagination. For children to see how people can think of crazy things and for them to be able to imagine other things on their own. Though the author makes sure the reader knows that the people of the the town are scared and upset I am not sure if there is much belief that all of this is really happening.

Connections to the MA ELA Frameworks would be 10 (genre), and 17.6 (Identify and analyze the similarities and differences in the presentation of setting, character, and plot in texts, plays, and films.)