Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs : Predicatable book

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ls" by Judi Barrett is a fun and imaginative book. The book start off with a family having breakfast; a grandpa, a mom, and a sun and daughter. It is a Saturday morning which means it is pancake morning for this family. The two kids are debating who will eat the most pancakes and while Grandpa is flipping a pancake, one gets away and lands on the boys head. Everyone laughs about it and then all of the pancakes are eaten. That night, Grandpa tells a bedtime story about a small town far far away called Chewsandswallows. Like other towns, it has a Main Street, houses, a schoolhouse, a church, pets, and people. The difference is that there are no food stores because all the food needed comes from the sky. Three times a day, there would be meals that come in like weather. It will rain soup and juice and snow mashed potatoes and peas. There would even be storms of hamburgers. The weather channel would let the town people know what they will be eating the next day. Everyone in the town carries around their plates, cups, glasses, forks, spoons, knives, and napkins everywhere they go to catch the next meal. Some of the leftovers would be put in their refrigerators for snacks in between meals. What they would eat would change everyday. One day for lunch, hot dogs already in their buns came down followed by a light mustard rain and soda to finish off the meal. The Sanitation Department's job was to collect all the left over food. The left over food would be used to feed all the dogs and cats, then some of it went into the ocean for the fish, turtles, and whales. The rest of the food would go back into the ground to enrich the soil. Then suddenly, the weather turned bad. There was a day of nothing but Gorgonzola cheese, the next day was only overcooked broccoli, and the next was brusselsprouts and peanut butter with mayonnaise. As days went on, the food continued to get bigger and came in a larger quantity. Then one day, huge pancakes blew in that covered houses and the school had to be closed because they could not remove the giant pancake that had landed on it! Everyone in the town was becoming fearful of the pending food storms and what would happen. Eventually the Sanitation Department had to quit because the job became too build and everyone feared their lives and could not go outside most of the time. Finally, the town people decided they had to leave their beloved town to save their lives. So the used giant pieces of stale bread to make boats and packed all their necessities, and off they went. They finally came to a small coastal town where they set up their new lives. No one ever went back to Chewsandswallow to find out what happened to their town. They people had to get use to buying their food at stores and preparing it for themselves. That was the end of Grandpas story and the next day, the snow on the ground looked like mashed potatoes to the two children.
While this book is very entertaining and fun for students, there is not a point or lesson along with it. It does encourage imagination though, something that I do not think teachers spend enough time on. Imagination is very active in young children and needs to be fostered. This would be a fun book to read to a class and maybe have an activity to go along with, but I can not think of any lessons that can be intertwined that would be beneficial for students. It would probably be better for parents to work on reading this book with their children at home since they do enjoy the story so much.
Barrett, Judi (1978). Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division.