Teaching Earth Science with Children’s Literature: Can It Rain Cats and Dogs?

Can it Rain Cats and Dogs? , by Melvin and Gilda Berger is a well composed book of questions and answers about weather. It is filled with detailed illustrations by Robert Sullivan that correlated to the topics on each page. We all know that children have question after question about anything you can imagine. Weather is a particularly difficult subject but it effects human daily behavior so kids naturally have tons of questions. Can it Rain Cats and Dogs? approaches the questioning in kid friendly ways by simplifying the wording. Examples are “Does air have weight?, Why does the weather keep changing?, and Can you smell rain?”. The book is broken down into sections entitled “Introduction”, “Sun, Air and wind,” “Rain, Snow, and Hail,” and “Wild Weather.”