If Take A Mouse To The Movies

One of my favorite holiday books…

And there’s SO much you can do with it!  We had a little “If You Take A Mouse To The Movies” day the other day and the kids had so much fun!!  Of course, we started out reading the book.  After reading, we talked about cause & effect and made a diagram to show the chain of reaction.

I also assigned each kiddo to a story event and had them illustrate it.  Then we came together as a whole group and I had the kids work together to sequence the events on a giant filmstrip!

I really wanted a text to self writing activity, so I gave them the prompt, “If you take me to the movies, I will ask you for some…”.  I had them complete the sentence with the words of things they like to get when they go to the movies!  And these little writing templates turned out so dang cute!  It took me FOREVER to figure out how I wanted to display their writing, but the idea of a festive little Christmas mouse and a clapboard won out in the end!  I LOVE how different each of them look!  {Just incase you’re wondering…I precut all of the big pieces…clapboard pieces, head, hands, hat, ears}  AFTER they were finished writing…and after I double checked it…I let the kids grab their materials to start assembling their little mice.  They cut their own eyes & nose & drew the whiskers, too!

I pretty much died when I saw that this sweetie wrote, “popcorn and a cup of iced tea.”  HA!!!

For our Daily 5 stations, I had the kids work on a few little mouse themed activities. 

Here the kids are sorting chunk words {-oke, –ose, –ore} on popcorn into the corresponding popcorn tubs.  After they sorted the words, the kids had to write them onto a large popcorn tub template and label it accordingly.

I also had the kids make CVC words using little clapboards and flimstrip letters.

The first slide/page in this download are hand drawn pictures {by yours truly ;)} that I used when I taught Kindergarten.  I made rebus sentences out of them.  {He will ask you for some…}  The kids had to match the words to the pics. 

Of course, I didn’t get around to everything I wanted to do.  No shocker there.  But some other ideas I had were to…

**have the kids create popcorn garland for the class tree.  Cut out construction paper popcorn pieces {or print some off} and have the kids make words/fact families/etc. on each template, hole punch the top, and then string them together with yarn.

**make filmstrip sentences.  I thought it would be fun to have large, premade filmstrip pieces and on each strip, write a different word.  The kids would have to work together to put the sentence in order.

 

Do you guys do anything fun with this book?!?   I’d love for you to share if you do!