"By golly, Jim... I'm beginning to think I can cure a rainy day!" -- McCoy

“I hear the first drops. Like the tapping of a stranger at the door of a dream, the rain changes everything.”
― Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust 

This is a quote from the story "Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse. Rain plays in intricate part in this story.  It is a story about a young girl named Billie Jo who lived during the time of the dust storms in the 1930s that hit the areas in Colorado, Kansas,Oklahoma and Texas, creating what was known as the Dust Bowl of America. This disaster was the cause for 500,000 people to become homeless and 200,000 to migrated to places like California.  Many people died from illnesses like dust pneumonia and malnutrition.


When teaching Social Studies this book gives our student a perspective on events of the past.  Our students, who are more caught up into today's events such as "whatever is going on with Snookie" and "how is Justin Bieber doing today" should be reading this book in order to get an idea about the big picture of past events and how they help us to predicate the future events of our world.

This story also deals with not just how such a great disaster could have been avoided if there were conservation structures in place, but how a young girl deals with her life living in these types of conditions and the loss she has as disaster destroys the life she has come to know.  Of recent events, we can have our students relate to this if we look at what happen in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina.  Many of our students know about this event and how it affected the people of New Orleans by news accounts, re-telling by family members and in relation to people they know who had experienced this tragedy.

Of course, it was a different type of disaster in different time and place.  But to have our students to be able to compare and contrast the two would be a great lesson.  As a teacher, I could ask questions that would start my students thinking about the book and what it was trying to convey to its readers.  Questions about the "theme" of the book, the "characters that are portrayed and how to understand this is "historical fiction" and how the writer came to create such a vivid and close to realistic story.  They could even create their own story based on the facts of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and also create a video such as these students have done about the book to show their comprehension of what they read.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympUoMwk590&feature=related