Weather is the only science that comes to your house. A child can grow up without ever meeting a wolf, a volcano or a coral reef, but the sky turns up on its own schedule and sometimes it turns up hard. That alone makes this title worth owning even if the rest of the series never lands in your cart.
Ms. Frizzle's class takes on the weather. The bus goes up into the clouds and through a hurricane, and there is a tornado as well before the day is over. Arnold gets lost along the way, which is the peril the story runs on. Joanna Cole wrote it and Bruce Degen drew it, and it is a picture book with cartoon panels rather than a chapter book.
The science it actually teaches
The reason it sits on our Stealth Science shelf is that it treats a storm as a machine rather than as a mood. Most weather books for young children are about how weather feels. This one is about how weather is built.
Start with the fuel, because that is the piece almost nothing else at this age gets across. A hurricane runs on heat lifted off warm ocean water. The water goes up as vapor, carrying the heat with it, and the storm is the engine that does the lifting. Push that engine onto land and the supply is cut off, which is why a hurricane weakens once it comes ashore, and why these storms belong to warm water and a season rather than turning up anywhere at any time.
Then the lifting itself, which is the whole of weather in one move. Warm air rises. As it rises it cools. Cool air cannot hold as much water, so the water comes back out as cloud and then as rain. Every single thing a child will ever be taught about clouds is a variation on those three sentences, and this book puts them in a child's head at seven.
Pressure comes next, and here the book does something useful by making wind into a consequence instead of a mystery. Air moves from where there is more of it toward where there is less. The bigger the difference, the harder it moves. Wind is not a thing the sky decides to do. It is air going somewhere, and the somewhere can be measured before the wind arrives.
The eye is the best page in the book. In the center of the worst storm on earth, the air is sinking rather than rising, and because rising air is what makes weather, the middle is quiet. A child who understands that will also understand the thing that makes the eye dangerous, which is that the calm is the halfway mark and not the end.
The tornado is a separate animal and the book is right to keep both in one place. Different size, different cause, different lifetime. Children mash these two together constantly, and having them on adjacent pages is the fastest way to pull them apart.
Last, the forecast. Instruments read pressure, moisture and wind, and a warning is arithmetic done early rather than a guess made confidently. For a child sitting through a watch, knowing that somebody measured something is worth more than any reassurance you can offer.
A child who finishes this can tell you why a hurricane loses strength over land. Plenty of adults cannot.
The child it lands with
Some houses have a weather child, the one who checks the sky before breakfast and reports back on it. If yours has one, this book gets read to pieces.
The one who has already sat through a bad storm. There is a particular kind of child who wants to go back and take apart the thing that scared them, and for that child this is not a book about weather, it is a book about the night the power went out.
The one who reads the disaster pages of every nonfiction book first and skips the rest. This gives that appetite something to eat that is also true.
Not the child who is currently frightened of storms. That one gets this book too, but not this week, and there is a section below about the timing.
One place to stop and talk
Why is the middle of the worst storm on earth the quietest part of it?
Put that question at the eye page and let the answer come slowly. Air is sinking there instead of rising, and rising air is what makes weather. Take the lifting away and you get a hole. Then the useful follow-on, which is what it would mean to walk outside during the quiet part.
What to know going in
This is the one book in the series where the caution is about your particular child in your particular week, so it deserves more room than usual.
Arnold gets lost in the storm. That is the story's engine and there is no way around it. The tone never leaves silly, nobody is hurt, and the class treats the whole thing as an adventure, so for most children it reads exactly like every other scrape in the series. For a child who has actually been through severe weather, or one who is already anxious about it, a lost boy in a hurricane is not automatically funny, and the pictures are vivid on purpose.
So the real advice is about timing rather than content. Do not hand this over during a watch, on the night of a warning, or in the week after a storm has come through. Hand it over on a clear ordinary day when the sky outside the window is boring. The book is a good thing to have already read when the weather turns, and a hard thing to read while it turns.
Now the other side, because it matters just as much. For the child who is frightened of storms in general, this is one of the better things you can put in front of them, once the sky is calm. Most weather fear is fear of a thing with no shape. A storm that has fuel, a structure, a life span and a reason to weaken is a great deal less frightening than a storm that simply arrives. Several of the sentences in this book are the ones you will end up repeating during the next real one.
Two smaller things. The page runs three streams at once, the story line, the speech balloons and the hand-lettered reports around the margins, which is the series signature and which some children cannot track. And the store bands it 2 to 5, which is about content rather than reading level, so the margin text is dense for a second grader working alone.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 at The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane, and unlike most of the shelf it has a season. If you live where storms come, buy it in the quiet part of the year and read it then, so it is already familiar the first time a watch goes up. If you live where they do not, it is still the book that teaches how clouds and wind work, because a hurricane is just ordinary weather turned all the way up and it is far easier to see the mechanism at that size.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Beehive Is a City: The Magic School Bus Inside One
The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Inside Your Own Eye: The Magic School Bus and the Senses
The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Ada Lace and the Impossible Mission: Scale and Sensors
Ada Lace and the Impossible Mission by Emily Calandrelli
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
