Book of the week: Valentine Mice

(You might have noticed that the title of this post has changed from "Activity" of the week to "Book" of the week. This is because I noticed that I'm most often posting about one book and many accompanying activities. So, each week I'll post my literacy-based activities under "book" of the week. 

This week is all about Valentines Day! I've been using this cute little book for lots of my younger kids this week. I like it because it has great pictures with a lot of action, but few words. That way I can get the kids to make more inferences and think a little bit more about what's happening in the story.

This story is about a family of mice that make and deliver Valentines to all of their neighbours. Like all of the other books I do, this one lends itself to lots of different levelled activities. My kids who are just learning how to put words together can practice describing the pictures:




"He is falling," for example.




​For kids using more complex language, I use this book for inferencing questions as I mentioned above. It also lends itself well to a few vocabulary words, such as "deliver," "anxious," and "relieved."

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The mouse is UNDER the slide

There are so many great activities that can accompany this book. For one kiddo learning location prepositions, we played a hide and find game. 

I mentioned there were lots of good opportunities for inferencing and predicting in this book because of the limited words. Some questions I might ask are:

• What holiday do you think this book is about? (I always do a cover-prediction, where I ask the kids questions before we've even opened the book. Depending on their attention span, I may also ask them to predict what might happen in the book.)
• How do the mice feel about delivering Valentines?
• How will their friends feel when they receive the Valentines?
• How do you think these mice know each other? (ie: family, friends, classmates?)
• What is the parent thinking when the little mouse falls off the sled? (I sometimes use a thought bubble sticky note to practice these questions)
• It's winter, so what do you think the pond is like? What will it be like to cross it?
• How do you know the mother mouse realized the little mouse is missing?
• What are they feeling when they find the little mouse buried in snow?
• What could they do to help him?
• How do they feel once they get him out?

You can see, there are a lot of questions about feelings here! Valentines Day is also a time when I focus on feelings with my kids. The Story Grammar Marker from MindWing Concepts uses a heart shaped icon to indicate feelings in a story, so it gels in nicely with Valentines Day. We start in the context of the book, discussing how the family feels when they're delivering Valentines, when they realized one of the mice is lost, and when they find him again. Then we do an art project thinking about all of their own feelings. This is a great jumping off point for the Zones of Regulation as well. In the art project below, we just used pink hearts, but you could easily use hearts to correspond to the Zones. 

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This book can also be used for some articulation practice. There are quite a few consonant clusters to target, such as "sl," "gl," "fl," and more.

Stay tuned for next week (or the week after that, let's be honest!) where I share the next selection of book-related activities.

Thank you for reading and happy speaking!
​Amanda