This book takes you on a magical journey of playing with sand to creating mountains. It a great story of how mountains are created using a story of a child playing with stand. The illustrations will have you glued to this book. It's a great book to have in you library. ( )

This is a good book to read as an introduction to plate tectonics and weathing and erosion. ( )

This picture book explores the way mountains form and the way they erode from sun, wind and rain, and then they are sometimes reformed again into new mountains. At each stage of the mountain, a young girl makes a mountain out of sand on a beach. As the real mountain goes through the events that erode it, the same things happen to the girl's sand mountain, and she too rebuilds after a rain storm erodes it away.
I really like the way they juxtapose the girl and her sand mountain with events that take millions of years to happen to the real mountain, since that amount of time, on something so large might be too much for young children to understand. But they can probably relate to the girl on the beach with her sand mountain.
The author wrote the story while living in Seattle while taking geology classes. She wanted a local event that would demonstrate the point she wanted to make. The Chuckanut Formation in northwest Washington, which had rivers wear it down into thick sandstone beds and then rose into new crests. So there is a Pacific Northwest connection as well.

this book puts into simple words how mountains are made
ages:5-10
source: pierce college

The two page spreads in The Sun, the Wind, and the Rain draw a parallel between the Earth and Elizabeth's formation of a mountain and how the sun, wind, and rain affect it. I think this is a great way to have a change of pace Earth Science section in a classroom. I feel it'll be helpful for kids to have some background knowledge before starting this or be able to explain during the reading. This book had beautiful illustrations and Elizabeth's day at the beach made it more engaging. This easily could have been a bland, basic story attempting to explain the process of erosion or weathering but instead it was a delight to read. While it only scratches the surface of the subject, I think it will prompt children to want to learn more about geology. ( )