Pistes d'exploration

Examine the cover page and title. Share your experiences with puddles. Make predictions about the story. Notice how you use your schema about puddles to make predictions.

As you read, make a list of rhyming words from the text.

Reread, noticing the different background colours. How does the illustrator use colour to help you understand the story?

As you read, act out the story. Pretend to hear the storm, splash in puddles, get your boots stuck in mud, slog through wet grass, play leap frog, etc.

Preview the vocabulary words that are important for comprehension such as sky, outside, puddles, get wet, worms, etc.

Use physical response to practise words such as fright, glee, squirm, jump, slog down, leap, applaud.

Look at the cover and guess what will happen in the story. What happened before this picture? After?

As the story is read aloud, join in for the recurrent passages and onomatopoeias.

Match pictures and labels of previewed vocabulary.

And Red Galoshes: A Story About a Rainy Day, We're Going on a Bear Hunt, A Flock of Shoes

Mots-clés

Picture book , Play , nature , poetic language , puddles , rain , weather

Commentaire descriptif

A lovely lively romp into the realm of children’s play that is sure to inspire glee as the brother and sister protagonists explore the natural world after a rainstorm: leaping in puddles, trudging through wet grass and squelching through mud. They stop only long enough to return home to get dry and warm and then do it all over again. Language is rich with onomatopoeia, poetic language and rhyme: “We slog through wet grassand suck mud with our boots –slup slup slup.” Paint and pastel illustrations are filled with childlike wonder. We start immersed in the dark green and grey tones of a nighttime storm, the children pressed up against the window to hear the “Ka-BOOM.” The following morning, the world bursts into colour with brilliant greens and yellows. Through ingenious use of perspective, the children lead the way through this illustration-dominated story. We see little heads looking up at the tall trees above, tiny dots of rain still on the branches: “Needles glisten –listen –the drip drip dripfrom the eavesand the leaves;” we get eye-level with the worms and the mud. A fabulous celebration of rain, nature and the joy of being a child, viewed from a child’s perspective.