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When the Dark Clouds Come
The new picturebook by WashU Children’s Studies lecturer Danielle Ridolfi offers a contemporary take on the here and now story. Deeply inspired by Margaret Wise Brown and the pedagogical framework of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, When the Dark Clouds Come is a mindful exploration of the coming and going of an ordinary summer event—a thunderstorm. The text invites a curiosity about the ways in which the storm impacts the objects in a young child’s view, including sheets on a clothesline, leaves on a tree, and the rooms inside a house. The layered, textured collages, which feature items like fabric, pressed leaves, wallpaper, and old book pages, and together with the books lyrical text, strengthen the book’s focus on multi-sensory learning and invite readers to explore their own material here and now outside of the book’s pages.