If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

We're not doing book themes every week this year, but for the first few weeks of our school year (and a few more scattered throughout), all the subjects lined up nicely. Digging through a box of books my ex-preschool-teacher-aunt gave us, I found three of the "If You Give A . . . " series and decided to do all three in a row. We started with the original, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Levi reading the book to Owen.

Craft: cardboard mice, using the flip side of a cardboard box (Wheat Thins, I believe), Sharpie (I drew the outline), brown paint, googly eyes, and a pipe-cleaner tail. Owen made one, too . . . not sure why my pictures are all of Levi!

Painting the mouse.

Gluing on eyes and ears.

Cute little mice!

Art: I snagged Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals for a few dollars on Amazon. Levi and I worked through this first one together, but I suspect he'll be able to do it on his own by the end of the year. 

While Levi enjoys drawing and painting, Owen is my true artist. He will sit at the table with art supplies long after Levi has run off to something else. Owen watched from his seat at the table as Levi and I worked through the steps of the mouse, then presented this to me: on the left, his own "I'm going to draw a mouse," and on the right, attempting to follow the steps in the book. His whiskers ended up where the eye should be, but for an almost-four-year-old, I was impressed!

Science: For science, we're following the suggestions in The Well-Trained Mind, a guide to classical education at home. Officially, this year is biology. In practice, that means each week we look up our animal of the week in the Kingfisher First Encyclopedia of Animals. I read the page to the boys, close the book, and have Levi repeat back to me three things he learned or found interesting. For now, I'm writing down his answers, but eventually I'll have him write them down himself. I put his art drawing at the bottom of the page, so that we're creating a science/art notebook that looks like this:

Miscellaneous: There are a TON of websites with activities for the If You Give . . . books. The official website, mousecookiebooks.com, has matching and counting activities that Owen enjoyed. We didn't do any other activities last week, but you can find a comprehensive list of ideas here!