If You Take a Mouse to the Movies FREE Activity

I have a love/hate relationship with this week of school.  It’s this way every year for me.  I LOVE it because we get to do some more fun activities, but I hate it because the kids are just as ready for the break as me, which makes for a bunch of crazies in the classroom!  But I do have one trick up my sleeve…we read If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff.

Why do I bust out this amazing read aloud? Because not only is it perfect for your Christmas/holiday-themed week, but you can also introduce inferencing and sequencing with it. Let’s jump into some fun activities to use with If You Take a Mouse to the Movies.

Teaching Making Inferences

This book is really simple for introducing the topic of making inferences.  As I read aloud the book I just did a think-aloud and created an anchor chart for us to refer to as we talked about inferring and later when we talked about sequencing events.

Before I dive into a lesson, I often model using sentence stems while I think out loud. This helps provide students with a framework to practice academic language. It also helps our ELLs, too. Some of the sentence stems for making inferences I like to incorporate include:

• I can infer… because…
• Perhaps… because…
• I know that… The book said… So I can infer…

You can read more about how to teach making inferences HERE as well as find a FREE lesson with activities for teaching inferences.

Sequencing Events

The next day, we listened and watched someone else read the story on YouTube.  We then re-told the If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by drawing and sequencing the events.  Because of ALL the things that little mouse wants to do, we were pretty busy.  Our movie strips were LOOONNNGG.  You might give students a set number of boxes to use and have them preplan out their important events.

If you need something to keep your little ones busy for the next two days, grab this freebie! It makes sequencing and retelling a bit more fun. And let’s be honest … who doesn’t love when activities are themed to match a book!