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.