If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is a really great kids book, especially when it comes to discussing cause and effect. After all, if you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want some milk to go with it. There are also so many great options for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activity topics that you could spend weeks on this book without having overlapping ideas for tying into the book! Here, I list a few of my favorite activities for this classic book.
(This post contains some affiliate links to products that may be of interest during these activities. See bottom of post for more info).
Sensory Activity When it comes to baking cookies, what’s the first thing you think of? Sure, you might think of the delicious taste, or the texture of soft-baked cookies. But I can guarantee that somewhere on the list, you’re going to be thinking of the delicious scent that fills the air when cookies are baking. The perfect If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activity for sensory development is to make smelling jars. I took 6 clean, empty baby food jars and used a nail to poke holes in the lid. Then, I dropped 2-3 cotton balls into each jar. You can finish up with essential oils, but I simply used different cooking extracts that would be reminiscent of cookies. The 6 jars I made were: vanilla, cinnamon, almond, orange, raspberry, and peppermint. I screwed the jars on tightly and labeled each one with the scent, then encouraged Zach to smell. He had a few that he instantly turned up his nose at, but others became scent favorites. The jars rapidly became a good way to help him calm down, too. In the middle of a stressful moment, I’d often bring out a scent jar, and just let him smell until he relaxed.
Dramatic Play One of our favorite activities with every new book theme is to create a fun dramatic play center that matches the book. Cookies are clearly a consistent theme in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activities planning, and to capture that cookie spirit, we decided to make a delightful bakery dramatic play center. We used an existing play kitchen that we had (but if you don’t have a play kitchen, there are some great make-your-own tutorials on Pinterest, or you can set up a nice table with some kitchen gear for a quick solution!)
I added some play foods, and made a few items of my own using felt. Our essential bakery items included felt cookies, some felt cupcakes, and a pie plate with a removable pie crust where we could put in pom poms in different colors like red for cherries or blue for blueberries.
Zach was equipped with a hot pad, some measuring spoons, an empty small milk jug, an empty creamer bottle, empty berry cartons, some spoons and bowls, and some play money. We used the checkout stand of a shopping set we had previously purchased, but again, a small table would work fine. Mostly, we just looked around the house for items that we already had that would work. A bakery is nice because almost everyone has some kitchen gear like cookie cutters that is quick and easy to use for a play bakery for a week or two.
We would often take turns playing chef and customer, and as a customer, Zach would create elaborate orders such as “I’d like 3 cookies, some coffee with cream and sugars, and an egg. But not the purple egg.” (After a day or so, we decided to fill an empty, clean egg carton with easter eggs for play, also. We also wanted more than just sweets so we used some fruits and vegetables we had from a Melissa and Doug set). As chef, Zach would take time to bake the items, like pie, and make me wait until they were ready. We also printed an open-closed sign, and by the end of the week, Zach had learned to read open and closed signs at other establishments in different typefaces. It’s good to introduce little bits of literacy into play. Head over to my facebook page later today for a download link to our special Open/Closed sign and a great bakery banner for your own play bakery!
Science and Cooking For me, one of the biggest things that kids should learn is both science and self-sufficiency in the kitchen. When you’re able to use a book that has a cookie theme, it makes for a great combination. Kids who learn how to help in the kitchen at an earlier age feel more comfortable in the kitchen later and are better able to adapt to those real-life situations when they’re older.
One of Zach’s favorite If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activities was to be able to make chocolate chip cookies of his very own! I took time to premeasure most of the ingredients (getting his help with some of the easier-to-measure items like white sugar), then had him do the pouring, mixing, and shaping of the cookies. It’s a great hands-on tactical experience to feel the dough. Always be sure to wash hands thoroughly before and after handling cookie dough when shaping cookies. Visit my facebook page today for a downloadable recipe card with the play kitchen printables!
Art One of the activities I grew up on as a kid was making homemade crayons. Making homemade crayons reinforces some fantastic color principals that can really help kids grow. There are a few great ways that this activity ties into If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, though. First off, with cookies being a central theme in the book, this is a great baking activity that doesn’t happen to produce any food– making crayon cookies is a perfect way to practice the principals of baking without actually having any added sweets. Later, the crayons can be used to draw a picture of the child’s family– just like the mouse draws in the classic book!
To make crayon cookies, start by peeling any broken crayons that you have. If you don’t have any broken crayons, we had a lot of success by posting on a Facebook swap page “ISO broken crayons. If you’re looking to throw them out, we’ll take them off of your hands!” We ended up getting bags of crayons– more than enough to share with friends. Same goes for the baby food jars in the scent activity– I got mine by posting an ISO (in search of) on facebook.
Sort the crayons by color if you’d like– varying shades of blue together, varying reds, etc, asking your child for help (and allowing them to do the bulk of the sorting, but helping as needed). Another fun way to do crayons is to do fun color combinations, which works well for advanced students, also– warm colors together (reds, oranges, yellows), cool colors (purple, blue, green), or even colors that make an interesting pattern (blues and greens make a globe-looking crayon, while browns, tans, and greens create a camouflage crayon). Once you’ve sorted the crayons into a mini muffin pan, you’ll bake them at 250 degrees for 10 minutes. Remove them carefully, then let it cool for 20 minutes on the counter, then place in the refrigerator or freezer to make them easy to remove. I found the easiest removal process was to tap the pan on the counter to loosen the cooled crayon cookies. After that, we had a blast coloring the family photo. Of course, my son drew an orange figure with grey on top and exclaimed “Look! It’s papa! And papa’s hair!” (Papa went grey a very, very long time ago).
Music and Fingerplays Hickory Dickory Dock ties into If You Give a Mouse a Cookie perfectly! With counting rhyme, you can even do the activity with a mouse finger puppet, but even without, a song about a mouse running up the clock sounds like the perfect addition to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
Hickory dickory dock
the mouse ran up the clock!
The clock struck one– ONE!
The mouse ran down!
Hickory dickory dock
Hickory dickory dock
the mouse ran up the clock!
The clock struck two– ONE! TWO!
The mouse said ACHOO!
Hickory dickory dock
Hickory dickory dock
the mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck three– ONE! TWO! THREE!
The mouse said YIPEE!
Hickory dickory dock
Hickory dickory dock
the mouse ran up the clock
the clock struck four– ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!
The mouse said NO MORE!
Hickory dickory dock
This rhyme and fingerplay is a lot of fun. To start the fingerplay, wave your hands back and forth the way a pendulum sways back and forth on a grandfather clock. As the mouse runs up the clock, make a motion as though the mouse is running up one arm. As you count off the time, use your fingers to show the time– one finger for one, two fingers for two, etc. Finish by running the mouse down your arm again. Repeat these motions for each verse.
Spanish This year, Zach’s focus language is Spanish, so I’m looking to introduce him to the language as much as possible during the year. I was lucky enough to find the perfect Spanish language tie-in online. On Youtube, there is a Spanish language version of the book that works well for students who have read the English-language one once or twice. Grasping the full understanding of Spanish isn’t necessary right now, but hearing the sounds and seeing the reader’s lip movements is a helpful way for younger students to get a feel for those sounds.
Additionally, if you’re using your own Spanish-language program, lessons on food and eating can be a really good learning lesson at this time. We use the Little Pim curriculum so Little Pim DVD 1
: Eating and Drinking and Little Pim: Numbers board book
made the perfect tie-in to our lesson, and a good addition to our If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activities. One thing to note: Little Pim has multiple languages so the Numbers book is a trilingual book for Spanish, English, and French. The DVDs vary in language, so if your child is learning French, Chinese, Hebrew, etc, the DVD 1 is still eating and drinking, regardless of the language your child is learning. By adding in these language lessons, and recognizing that we could do math and science as a part of our If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activities, we were able to develop our activities for the book into a full-fledged two week learning curriculum for preschool.
Fine Motor One great fine motor activity for kids is to give them a pattern for mouse ears– two circles on grey paper, two smaller circles on pink paper (to make the inner ear). Have them cut this out, glue the pink centers onto the grey larger circle, and attach to a headband or elastic to make a cute mouse hat.
For more Fine Motor reinforcement, Kumon first steps workbooks like Let’s Cut Paper! Food Fun
and Let’s Sticker and Paste! Food Fun
both tie in well to a baking theme. Their other workbooks, which are animal based, also tie into the fun animals in Laura Joffe Numeroff’s books, so you really can’t go wrong with their Pasting and Cutting workbooks.
Field Trip We were very lucky to tap into the cookie theme during the week our town got a brand new bakery! It meant that we got to go and experience fresh-baked cookies and talk to the owner about bakeries a bit more. Of course, you could also visit an animal sanctuary and learn more about mice, or go to a children’s art museum to tie into the mouse drawings in the book, but we found that a bakery tied in quite well so we could have fresh cookies and milk.
Related Reading You can’t just necessarily stick with If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activities. Instead, you’re also able to expand on what your young reader is learning from this book by reading other books that tie into similar themes and topics. As you can see, we really latched onto the “cookie” part of the book, so we decided to seek out other cookie-related books to read and put in our book basket for the week. The way we handle our book basket is that we take time to read our central book a few times in a week, but before bed, we pick out books that are related from our book basket to read. Otherwise, the book basket is situated in the book basket for free reading– even though Zach isn’t at reading age yet, a lot of literacy is gained through just sitting down and becoming familiar with books, looking at letter shapes, and learning book sequences through illustrations. Here are our picks for related reading.
Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? This classic story is a really fun related book, and can be used later as a fingerplay or rhyme. It truly is a classic, and most people will be fairly familiar with the concept of this one.
May I Please Have a Cookie? I’ll just say it: I love this book. It’s so cute to watch the subject of the book try everything… everything! to get a cookie, except for one thing. When it finally clicks– he must ask politely– there’s a big reward! It’s a great book to reinforce those principals of please and thank you, and a cute simple tale like this is a lot of fun. We chose to act this book out by allowing me to read each page, and Zach acting out the role of the main character of the book– trying different ways to get a cookie, then eventually buckling down and asking nicely. Roleplaying the book was a good way to get those concepts through.
The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? This is my favorite book in the set, and it follows along the same theme of May I Please Have a Cookie? but in a less polite, much sillier way. A pigeon is wondering how the duckling managed to get a cookie– with nuts!– and he asks for things but doesn’t get them. After the duckling reminds him to ask politely, the Pigeon learns something about asking nicely and being polite, as well as sharing, but the twist at the end will have you cracking up! Don’t miss the rest of the books in this series, either– you’ll be hooked on Pigeon’s crazy antics.
The Best Mouse Cookie This one is a Numeroff spinoff of the original book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and works through the creation of the Best Mouse Cookie there is. It’s a great board book that is a fun read if you love the original.
Seasonal books starring the Mouse from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie! There are plenty of great seasonal spin-offs of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie that are wonderful for different times of year when you may be exploring the book. There’s a School
version, a younger school version, a birthday one, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, a wintery Christmas tale, a younger Christmas story, and an Easter book.
Bake, Mice, Bake! If your kids love the idea of a mouse eating a cookie, then they’ll love this quick rhyming tale of mice owning a bakery! It’s a great story for early readers, packed with some simple sight words.
How Do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? If you’re a fan of the “How Do Dinosaurs…?” you’re going to love this one that is all about cookies! No, dinosaurs don’t stuff their face with too many or chomp loudly! They are polite and indulge carefully. The bonus in this book is that it’s got two cookie recipes in the back! Yum!
Apps that Rock If your kiddo is anything like Zach, they like having a little tech time. And screen time actually isn’t necessarily a bad thing for kids! Kids are going to be exposed to technology, and the ones who are able to adapt easily and early will be the ones most successful when it comes to careers and further education. That said, obviously there are limits, but we’ve found it fun to tie some apps into the books we read. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie activities are great, but they can be balanced with great educational apps that encourage play. The apps below are for sure available for Kindle Fire, which is the edition the links will take you to, but if you’re on Apple or Android, you may be able to find the items there, also.
Cookie Maker Game This one is a pretty straightforward app that allows kids to bake their own cookies– virtually! If you love the idea of teaching them about baking, but don’t want to have sweets around every time they decide to do cookies, this is a really good option for virtual play.
Toca Kitchen We’re big fans of Toca apps around here. In the Toca kitchen app, your job is to feed various animals or humans and see if they like the dish you prepared. You can do different things like blending, chopping, and cooking the food items you have available, and some will go over well, but others won’t. This app is very free-play format, without much structure or guidance. It’s a good contrast to guided-play apps, and I’m one who feels that both types of games are necessary.
Dr. Panda’s Restaurant
Dr. Panda’s Restaurant 2
All in all, there are a lot of fun ways that you can enjoy the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. With all kinds of activities, book tie-ins, and opportunities presented, you’ll have no problem celebrating this great book by Laura Joffe Numeroff. Don’t forget to stop by my Facebook page later today for downloadable content that ties into these themes, like a recipe card and bakery signs.
Are you a fan of the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie? What children’s book would you like to see us explore next and develop activities for?
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