Some picture books are almost poems, and this book is one of those. Mr. Tresselt uses alliteration and rhythm and parallelism to make the text flow, perfect for reading aloud. The story begins with a cat looking out of the window at the rain drops coming down, and it ends with all of the drips and drops gathered into waves on the ocean, and then the rain stops. The book has a simple but satisfying narrative arc to accompany the poetry of it. And if you’re counting, it can be an introduction to the science of the water cycle and weather and rain. So you get poetry, narrative, and science all wrapped up with a nice bow.
Rain Drop Splash was Alvin Tresselt’s first book for children, and it was a Caldecott Honor book in 1947. He was blessed to have experienced illustrator Leonard Weisgard who was asked by the publisher to do the pictures for Tresselt’s debut picture book, and I’m sure that gave Mr. Tresselt’s career a big boost, especially with the Caldecott recognition. The illustrations are indeed beautiful, black and white with splashes of yellow and red in each spread. Weisgard must have insisted on the color since his website biography explains, “As a schoolboy in New York, he was dissatisfied with the books supplied by the public schools he attended. He found the illustrations monotonous and thought that the world could not be all that dreary and limited to only one color.”
As for Alvin Tresselt, he says in the Afterword to my paperback copy of the book,
“RAIN DROP SPLASH started out as a mountain stream named Hyacinth, and I was going to follow her down the mountain until she eventually reached the sea. But somewhere along the journey my personified brook got hopelessly lost, and I realized that this approach would never work. I then decided to “tell it like it is,” and I traced the rain falling on a mountainside and making its way to the sea in a completely realistic manner. I accomplished this in less than five hundred words.”
Five hundred words, but such good words: dripped, splashed, trickled, splunked, tumbling, pickerel weed, barges, scows, tankers, buoy. I liked the words, and the phrases, and the full sentences, each one chosen carefully to create a whole picture of what happens when it rains. Rain Drop Splash is a good book to read aloud to preschoolers when it rains, when there are floods, or when you go on a boat ride or a visit to the ocean. (It would have been good during Hurricane Harvey days here in Houston. There is a farmer’s field and a road that floods in the book, but nothing scary.) Rain Drop Splash is also one of the many picture books listed in my preschool curriculum list, Picture Book Preschool, available for download at Biblioguides.