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Love using picture books in your elementary music classroom, but need more ideas? I’ve got you! This is a book based elementary music lesson that you can use to teach about beat, rhythm, and even quarter rest. Use this picture book music lesson for your kindergarten or first grade music lessons. The best part? Your students will love using If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
This book based music lesson is intended for kindergarten or first grade music lessons, and uses the book If You give a Mouse a Cookie. You can do the lesson without the book, but it makes more sense with it!
You can always get the books from the library or look up a Youtube read along– or buy it for yourself!
Click here to purchase on Amazon!
This lesson includes the book and teaches piano and forte, rhythm, quarter rest, and composition!
To make this lesson even easier, you can use the lesson pack that I created on TPT! It includes Google Slides, a move along video, printable manipulatives for composition, and worksheets to use in your classroom. The visuals and printables will make this so much easier to teach– so click here to get it!
Need more book based lessons? Check out this blog post
Movement for If you Give a Mouse a Cookie
First off, let’s get moving! I tell the students they are going to be mice. What do mice like? Cookies (also cheese). They have to sneak around the room keeping the beat in their feet– but they can’t be heard! If the music is loud, they can walk, but if the music is quiet, they have to tip toe. If the music goes off, they have to freeze.
You can do this manually, or you can use the video included I the slides to make it easy.
Beat or no beat?
Next up, play beat or no beat. Put 8 hearts on the board. Add icons of cookies to each heart. Point to them and have the students say “yum” in a steady beat.
Then, call on a student to “eat” a cookie and take it off. (I like to add numbers, so they just tell me what number they want to “eat”.) “Read” the pattern again, but this time, say yum on the cookies and don’t say anything on the hearts.
Continue taking off cookies until they have nothing left.
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie rhythm lesson
Next up, read the story!
Then, we get to the music. There’s 3 levels of this rhythm composition. You can use one or all of them depending on what you’re teaching!
We start by adding the different icons from the different things the mouse needs to compose a rhythm. This can be done whole group or individually.
Start with just the first things that the mouse has- the mouse and cookie. This could be something like “mouse cookie mouse cookie”. Have students read them rhythmically. You could even add instruments.
Then, read the next page and create a new rhythm on the new page with the new item. This could be in addition to the other one (make a suuuuuper long one) or you can erase it and start again each time.
Adding rhythm!
Next up, add the rhythm. Have students create a patterns with the words, then decode the rhythm by adding quarter notes to one syllable words and eighth notes to two syllable words.
If your students are working on rest, then could also leave some of the areas blank to signify that there is a rest onthe beat.
*If you are doing the rest MAKE SURE you use a beat chart so that students can keep track of what they are doing.
Let’s put it in the hallway!
On another day, you can have student create a rhythm to put in the hallway. Or onto the fridge. With some Scotch tape. Just don’t let them get thirsty afterwards. Because then they’ll need some milk. And a cookie.
I’m done.
If you’ve purchased the lesson, you could also use the printables as an assessment and use it to showcase in the hallway.
So that’s how you can do a mouse cookie composition activity along with If you Give a Mouse a Cookie.
If you didn’t already, grab the book here.
And grab your easy to implement lesson with slides AND printables here!
Happy teaching!
Becca
