Rainstorm, Barbara Lehman

Rainstorm is a wordless picture book.  With that being said you have to interpret the meaning of the book based off of the illustrations.  In the beginning of the book a little boy is looking out the window and it is raining.  In that illustration there is a ball that your eyes are just drawn too, it is important in the book.  The little boy found a key and finally found that it opened a treasure chest.  Once he opened the treasure chest it took him to a sunny land on the beach full of friends where he was happy and could play.  Then he came home and ate and slept, when he woke up the next morning and it was still raining so he went back to be with his friends.  It is a book that kind of comes full circle and is definitely a book I will have in my classroom library.

As I was beginning to read Rainstorm the first thing I noticed was on the inside jacket of the book there was a synopsis.  It gave the gist of the book saying it was about a rainy day and a lonely boy in a big house who found a mysterious key to an unexpected place.  This helped me to know what is going on in the book instead of just guessing.  In my classroom I would turn this into a mini lesson going over parts of a book and how it is important that we look for clues in those parts that might help us as we read the book.  This will help students become better readers.