Pourquoi tales, from the French word for why, are a genre of traditional literature. These folktales from around the world explain how natural phenomena came to be. When I taught a pourquoi tale unit to my students, I first prepared a collection of books to use for read-alouds, mentor texts, and for students' independent reading. Here are many of the books I collected.  This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are books that I found readily and inexpensively available for purchase online. I wanted stories from a wide range of cultures, and I also gathered some paired stories that explain the same natural phenomena from various cultural points-of-view.