If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Our story time theme this week is author Laura Numeroff.

We began with a nursery rhyme called “5 Currant Buns.”

5 currant buns in a baker’s shop,
Round and fat, with a cherry on top!
Along came a girl/boy with some money one day,
Bought a currant bun and took it away!

4 currant buns in a baker’s shop…
3 currant buns in a baker’s shop…
2 currant buns in a baker’s shop…
1 currant bun in a baker’s shop…

We used this fantastic printable from Picklebums for our rhyme. It was really cute, and the kids liked exchanging their pretend coin for pretend sweets.

After our rhyme, we read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the classic story about what happens when you give a mouse something that just so happens to remind him of a million other things.

After the story we played animal dice:

I printed numbers and animal actions and movements, then put them in a pair of blank, soft dice. The animal actions and movements I used were:

1. WIGGLE like a WORM!
2. ROAR like a LION!
3. HOP like a FROG!
4. WADDLE like a PENGUIN!
5. JUMP like a BUNNY!
6. STRETCH like a CAT!

After getting up and moving around a bit, we moved on to our second story, If You Give a Moose a Muffin. Following the same format as If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, it tells the story of a moose who finds that a single muffin reminds him of an awful lot of things he’d like to do.

When our story was finished, we did our craft, a paper plate chocolate chip cookie:

I got this craft from No Time for Flash Cards, where you can find the instructions as well as the recipe used to make the puffy paint. A fun variation on this idea would be to make several different colors of “frosting” and have a wide array of colored paper circles and scraps for sprinkles and chips.

The kids finished by playing pretend bakery, sorting plastic cookies, and setting up a very busy street on the program room floor.

Join us next week for more Laura Numeroff!