Story Time – If You Take A Mouse To School by Laura Numeroff

This morning I kicked off another year of Story Time at our local library.  This is one of my favorite things to do and I am so glad I have the time to do it and the kids to offer it to.  Today we had four kids from ages 1 1/2 – 4 years old and it worked out great.  Today’s story was:

We talked about the fact the most of them had big brothers or sisters that get to go to school each day and that this story would give them an idea of what going to school was like.

After I read the story, I talked about how at school you have to line up a lot to go to lunch, to the bathroom, or to get a drink.  So, we got out the instruments, lined up, and marched along to the song The Ants Go Marching In.  We marched, kicked our legs, followed the leader, and played our instruments.

After music time is craft time.  I got the idea for this story time craft from this blog:
Mom To 2 Posh Lil Divas

We talked about the letter “M” and that it is the first letter in the word mouse.  I used painters tape on heavy card stock to make the “M”.  Then I adapted this to fit our time frame.  The blogs suggests water color paints, but we wouldn’t have had time for it to dry so I just had the kids use crayons.  For the younger ones, it was a lot to color so I encouraged the moms to help.  You could also just have them outline the tape if they get tired of coloring.  Then, once it is all colored in, slowly peel off the tape.  It will likely pull up paper too, but since it is card stock it still worked fine.  Then add triangles for the ears (out of construction paper) and googly eyes, pom pom and pipe cleaners.  This is also a good opportunity to talk about shapes…triangles and circles for the ears, eyes and nose.  We used Elmer’s glue and after sitting for a bit, it held just fine.

We closed Story Time with Chips A’Hoy cookies…everyone’s favorite after school snack!  I sent home printables with the kids to continue the story.  They included a maze, a find the mouse page, and a coloring page printed from this site:  Harper Collins Childrens

Stay tuned for more Story Time posts in the future.  I may even try to catch up and post about previous years activities.