“If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” Activities

This week we had fun reading “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” and “The Best Mouse Cookie” by Laura Numeroff.Reading this story just wouldn’t be complete without teaching the boys how to make their very own batch of chocolate chip cookies. So that’s exactly what we did.

Warning: If you put your first batch of cookies in the oven while beginning the bedtime routine, you will in fact cook them about 2 minutes too long. haha! Good thing it was only the first 12 cookies, and these boys definitely had no complaints!!

My kids don’t help me out in the kitchen too often so allowing them to measure things out and use the mixer was a HUGE deal to them! They had so much fun, and I quickly learned I need to give them more opportunities to help me out while preparing meals.

A couple weeks ago I saw this fun idea on Pencils, Proverbs, Pandemonium & Pins, to make paper cookies with a number written on them, and then have your child put the correct amount of chocolate chips on it to match the number. I knew it would be perfect to use with my preschooler to go along with these books.

I decided to laminate my cookies without a number written on them because I wanted to do a couple different activities with them also. After I laminated them, I simply used a dry erase marker to write numbers 1-12 on the cookies and my son counted out the correct amount of chocolate chips to put on the cookies.

Ok, he doesn’t look that thrilled in this picture, but this is just his deep concentration look. He really was super excited about this math activity.

After he finished putting the chocolate chips on the cookies, I had him line the cookies up from least to greatest (1-10). I told him he could pick 3 cookies to eat the chocolate chips off of so he liked this part because it helped him figure out which cookies had the most on them.

I also reversed the activity by simply drawing the chocolate chips on the cookies and having him practice counting them to tell me how many were there.

I also let my son practice drawing his numbers on the cookies himself. Then he put the correct amount of dots on the cookies himself.

This was a fabulous activity for my preschooler. You should for sure go check out  Pencils, Proverbs, Pandemonium & Pins for even more ideas to use with this book. She used this book for her entire homeschool week so she has lots of different ideas.