If You Take a Mouse to School by Laura Numeroff is one of our tried and true back to school read-alouds. The kids love the little mouse and all his silly antics!
From the moment he wakes up to the end of the school day, he makes sure he’s in the mix. He does a little math. He tries out a science experiment. And he even builds himself a little mouse house in the block corner, complete with clay furniture.
The illustrations by Felicia Bond are a big part of what makes the story so adorable. If you’re not already familiar with the book, check it out and give it a shot. We’re sure your kids will love it!
ACTIVITIES TO EXTEND THE STORY
When you’re done reading If You Take a Mouse to School, plan for a few FOLLOW UP ACTIVITIES that review and build upon the story. These are a few of our favorite printable ideas, but I’ll also share some additional hands-on activities later in the post.
We start by giving kids their own modified copy of the story.👆 It follows the events in the book, but in a simplified way so beginning readers can work with the words.
Each page has a predictable language structure, along with early sight words for kids to trace. It’s a great choice for a whole group shared reading lesson. After that, kids can practice rereading it in small groups or with a partner.
And, if your students are like ours, they love games… especially memory matching games. This little set👆 includes key vocabulary words and images from the story, such as backpack, basketball, and cookies.
Why is there a sink, you ask? You’ll have to get the book and find out, but it has something to do with an exploding volcano disaster… one of the kids’ favorite pages.
Depending how far you want to go with the story, we’ve included a few worksheets to help children work on skills such as character traits, story sequence, and making comparisons, but our favorite of the set is the directed drawing. On this page👆, kids are taken through eight steps as they learn how to draw a mouse.
I rarely meet a kid who doesn’t love learning how to draw something!
You can preview the set HERE to see if it’s right for your back-to-school lesson plans. The activities are best for kids in kindergarten and first grade and are something you can use year after year.
MORE IDEAS FOR IF YOU TAKE A MOUSE TO SCHOOL
We also like these activities for extending the story, If You Take a Mouse to School. Some require a tiny bit of prep, but are definitely worth it.
- Plan a Classroom Scavenger Hunt – Hide small paper images of items from the story around the room. These could be pictures of a backpack, sandwich, lunchbox, skateboard, etc. Then, give the children clues for finding them. Discuss which events from the story are related to the pictures.
- Sort and Graph Mice Snacks – Treat the children to a few snacks mice like to eat, such as sunflower seeds, strawberries, and corn. Students can sort them by type, count how many of each, and create a simple bar graph.
- Write Your Own Class Book – Invite each student to complete their own page given the sentence starter: If you bring a mouse to our school, he will… Then, combine all the pages into one class book to read together.
- Build a Mouse House – Provide building materials for this STEM challenge and give children time to construct a house or school for the mouse.
- Play Cause and Effect Charades – Invite a student to act out something the mouse did in the story (for example, trying the science experiment) and let the rest of the class guess what will happen next based on the story sequence.
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