Book Themed Lesson Plans

When we don't have any specific themes in mind, one of our favorite things to do is find one of our favorite books and do projects based on those.


Part 1 - Laura Numeroff 
One of my favorite books when I was a kid was "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie", so I was excited to do a Laura Numeroff theme.

 One of my favorite projects based on the series was our "If You Give a Pig a Pancake" cause and effect project. We only had about two kids that had causes and effects that made sense, but it was still fun to talk about and everyone was pretty proud of their pigs.







For "If You Give a Moose a Muffin" we also did a collage. Mine was unfinished, but everyone drew their "scenery" as a background for their moose.











The final project (which I'll add a photo of later) was science experiment pictures. I cut out beakers and tubes of various sizes, and we painted them with a combination of shaving cream paint and corn syrup paint.
For all three projects, we did a chart of our favorite types of whatever baked good was in the book. We gave three choices for each and let everyone choose their favorites. The first one we did was the Pancakes, and we had a problem with people just choosing whatever their friends chose (we only had three votes for chocolate chip, despite the fact that almost everyone chooses chocolate chip when we have choices). For our next two charts (muffins and cookies), we told them before they chose that we were going to tell our cook which were everyone's favorites so she would know which kinds to make. We ended up with much more balanced results for those two.

Part 2 - Anna Dewdney
For our Anna Dewdney books we choose three of her Llama Llama books. Llama Llama Time to Share, Llama Llama Red Pajama and Llama Llama Mad at Momma.

We had a great time making Nelly's stuffed Gnu and Fuzzy Llama. I wish I had a picture of all of them because a lot of them got very creative. We ended up with a lot of brown gnus and blue llamas, and most of them ended up with arms, legs, and ears in the right place!

We made Llama Llama Red Pajama hand puppets. We found the idea here.





Our last project was more about cutting practice than an art project, since Llama Llama Mad at Momma takes place in a grocery store, we cut out items from grocery ads and glued them into our shopping carts.



Part 3 - Some of our favorite books

Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Pemberly, we also read Glad Monster, Sad Monster. Everyone created their own monsters in a variety of colors. I would love to do this again, and if I do I will definitely post photos of the results. I loved this project!

 Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister is another favorite. We decorated our own beautiful rainbow fish.

 There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is another great book. I especially like this version. Everyone put their old ladies together, and we wrote what we would swallow if we were an old lady in the stomach.

Let me know if you want templates for anything. I try to save them. 

Self-Esteem Theme

One of the first things we did in our Self-Esteem theme was a "Self-Esteem Quilt". I think I have a picture of the whole thing somewhere, but we just made squares and tied the corners together, so I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like. First, we went around the room and everyone said one thing that they really liked about themself, something that made them special. A few of my favorites were: "I like machines", "I'm good at drawing rainbows" and "my code word" (though I'm not sure what that one meant). We clarified that it could be something about your appearance, or something that you were good at or anything about yourself that you liked. We ended up with a lot of appearance or clothing based ones anyway, but I still really enjoyed what everyone thought was special about themselves.

Another favorite from our self-esteem theme was silly collages based on the book "I Like Myself" by Karen Beaumont. We read the book a few times, and had a lot of fun with our collages.

My silly portrait.

We did watercolors based on "Stripes" by David Shannon. Unfortunately, about 90% of our paintings stuck to the wooden boards we painted them on (which doesn't usually happen, so I don't know why it did with these. My only guess is that it's because we used our scratch & sniff watercolors). 

Thanksgiving & Who We're Grateful For Projects

We love holidays in our classroom! For Thanksgiving, instead of doing all turkeys and food and pilgrims, we focused the first two weeks on who we're grateful for. The first week, we chose to do firemen, soldiers and emergency medical workers. At the end of the week, we asked the kids who they were grateful for. The most common answers we got were family members, policemen and food (which we translated into chefs and people who cook us food). Here are some of our projects:

Here are our ambulances. The template was pretty simple and the kids had fun making them! I love that every one is different, but still recognizable as an ambulance. 

Our firemen. This was even simpler template-wise than the ambulances. We had fun making these as well, and again each one is different. 

My policewoman came out a little weird. I wish I'd remembered to take a photo of every else's police officers. I found this on pinterest, and decided to do something similar with police officers.  

 These turned out really cute! I found this chef on Pinterest, and based our chefs on that. We wrote everyone's favorite thing that someone cooks for them on the chef's jackets.

One of the projects we made after those first two weeks was our little Mayflowers. I like any project that includes sponge painting, so I had fun with this one.