Integrating Language Arts: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
This would be a great lesson for kindergarten or first grade. I think it may be a little too easy for second graders though. I would definitely use this lesson in my own first grade classroom. This lesson used the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff . At the beginning of the lesson students are invited to examine the pictures and then make predictions. The teacher can also use this time to remind students that sentences begin with capital letters and end with correct punctuation. Students can make predictions throughout the story. This is exactly what my first graders are working on now. In this lesson plan students complete a story circle. I had never heard of a story circle but I think students would really enjoy this activity. They are given a sentence strip and pictures from the story. The students will put the pictures in the same order as in the story, glue them on the sentence strip and glue the sentence strip’s ends together creating a circle.
My favorite part of this lesson was the idea to get together with another class. Students will retell the story to a student from the other class. Children love sharing and teaching other students. This would give students a meaningful reason to retell the story in a clear, sequential way. A way to tie in writing in an authentic way would be to use the lesson from session 4. This is another lesson that I will use in my own classroom. Students are given an “If-Then…Handout”. They will write and illustrate their own version of if...then. I think that my students would be motivated to complete this assignment, especially if they knew that we would make a class book using their completed work.
An extension activity had the book and tape/c.d. available for students at a listening center. I would probably have my students complete some sort of cloze activity after listening to the book. Another extension activity that I would use suggested students read other Laura Numeroff books and use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast books.
Stacy Durham