Laura Numeroff writing lesson

As a teacher, I loved working with Laura Numeroff’s books. The kids loved listening to her books and the antics of the different animals. In my second year of teaching I got a stuffed animal of her Mouse from the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books. Now that I have my own kids I was inspired to create a Laura Numeroff writing lesson. It’s a great way to get a Homeschool Writing lesson in for your reluctant writer and is a fun Book and Activity.

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Creating an ‘If You Give’ inspired writing prompt

I actually don’t have pictures of my kids working on this because I designed it to be completely independent work to do while I’m at Bible study and they are in childcare, so I’ll show you pictures of Superman’s work.  The great thing about this project is you can easily adapt it to either early writing or still just drawing pictures student.

There are four pages of writing prompts. First, they’ll pick one of her books and write/draw a review of the book. Next, they’ll brainstorm an animal and something their animal might do. The last two pages are planning out your steps, first the thing they’ll choose to do, and second how they think of it (describing words).

Superman’s version of the If You Give writing prompt

First, he went through and wrote out what happened in the story he read, he chose If You Give a Pig a Party, and got the highlights of the steps in the circle.

For those who are not familiar, the “If You Give books” are circle books. They end the same as they began.

Next, they chose an animal and they were supposed to think of words that started with the same letter.  You can see not all of Superman’s words start with the same letter, and that’s okay.  The goal was to get him thinking.

Next, he took the storyboard sheet and planned the sequence of events for his story.  He gave me a very long explanation, but I’m guessing his dog drove a car, rode a skateboard, and had a lot of fun.

The final step was to brainstorm words to use in your story.  Superman went through and chose some words that looked promising from the story he read, which wasn’t my intent, but it’s a good way for early writers to get some confidence and move forward in their writing, so I’m not going to complain at all.

This process gets your kids closer and closer to having a rough draft without it being a scary process.  They all really enjoyed coming up with story ideas and gave me some great stories.

If you’d like to get the printable I made, come JOIN MY NEWSLETTER, it’s on the subscriber page under the elementary section.

More writing ideas for you to try

• Comparing texts with early writers
• Danny and the Dinosaur writing prompt
• How to write a fable lesson
• Is Pluto a planet writing assignment
• Marco Polo writing prompts

Originally published in 2013 or 2018? All my notes are from 2018