… It’ll make for one great book!
By Yana Walljasper
One of my favorite books growing up was the famous If You Give a Mouse A Cookie, written by Laura Joffe Numeroff, and illustrated by Felicia Bond. I loved animals growing up, and all of my favorite books were about animals. If You Give a Mouse A Cookie is a picture book about a young boy who discovers a mouse in his house, and decides to give the mouse a cookie. This sets off a chain reaction of silly requests from the Mouse. Some of my favorite parts I remember from reading the book as a child were the mouse cutting his hair, taking a nap in a powder box, drawing a picture, and in the end, of course, asking for a glass of milk, but needing a cookie to go with it. This puts the story right back at the beginning.
While the story of this book is funny, and easy to follow for little kids, I think one of the things that really makes this book great are the illustrations. While there aren’t a lot of words on each page, the illustrations add details to the story that you don’t get from the words. The pictures show the boy making a mess to get the mouse what he wants, and then cleaning it up while the mouse moves on to something else. If you can’t relate to that as a parent or a teacher I don’t know what you can relate to!
I would recommend this book to children ages 3 to 8. I think that it’s a great book to read out loud to your kids, because they can look at the images and add to the story that way before they know how to read. When the child begins to learn how to read this is a good option because there aren’t a lot of words on each page. There are a lot of sight words, such as the, and, of, the, he, a, and more. The book also uses words of many everyday objects that children are familiar with, such as milk, scissors, pillow, book, crayons, and many more. If You Give a Mouse A Cookie can also help children to learn how to sequence events, try asking your child or student what happened first, second/third etc. and what happened last that made the mouse want a cookie again. Older students could cut and paste images from the book in the right order.
Children and Young Adult Lit 
I love to read this book! I’m sure children will LOVE to see the illusion of the mouse. They can imagine how the mouse doing. I never thought about the steps in the books. It’s good to teach the children how to see the sequence in the book. It’s a great book! Thank you for sharing! 🙂
Katelyn Miller
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I used to read this book too! The only books that I had like these were the mouse and cookie, and the pig and I believe waffle. I loved how you shared how children can learn from this book, very creative! I used to read this to my sister whenever she asked me to read her a book. Great share! It reminded me of my childhood 🙂
Chelsea Peters
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