I was asked to review the book, This House Needs a Mouse, by C. Jeffrey Nunnally and illustrated by Tamara Z. Brink. I should start out saying that I would never turn down the opportunity to review a book. I’m a little bit of a book nerd and the first grade teacher in me loves children books. I especially love seeing which books my kids love vs. which books I love.
This House Needs a Mouse really surprised me – in a good way. It’s one of the few books that my kids request over and over again. It technically spans 3 stories of 3 separate families. I new that Kate (7) and Caroline (6) would be okay following the story, but I worried that Rebecca (4) would have difficulty following all 3 story lines. Boy, was I wrong!
Rebecca seemed to take to the story the most. She loved the details and the more we read it, the more she was able to draw correlations between scenarios of the different stories. She was also able to compare and contrast the stories without any prompting, which I wasn’t expecting (and frankly it blew me away!). The bonus is that she has started using the word “ordinary” as a part of her regular vocabulary.
Kate and Caroline also loved the story. Because they are in 2nd and 1st grade, they are able to read some or most of the book on their own. It introduced them to reading new words like: ordinary, proclaimed, witnessing, and resolve. Their discussion of the story looked different. Here are some ways we used the story:
* Each child takes a character and reads their lines in that character’s voice.
* We discussed which family scenario is most realistic when it comes to a mouse in the house.
* We talked about different perspectives: What was the mouse thinking when the first family came in vs. what the cat was thinking when the second family came in? Why were the 2 families looking for different things?
* The girls wondered why the first family left the mouse behind instead of taking it with them.
* We predicted what might a 3rd story look like for the mouse family when the new baby comes along.
I can’t even begin to convey how many times we have read this story already. In the span of a week, we read it at least 7 times. It never gets old and we seem to discover some new factor every time we read it. This book will certainly be a Christmas gift for a few friends we have. It’s wonderful and I highly recommend it!
xoxo
–k
*This link is an affiliate links. What does that mean? It means if you click on the link to purchase this product I get a few pennies for every dollar, at no additional cost to you. Basically, in a year I’ll be able to take the girls out to ice cream. 😉
Kristina Grum is a Certified Parent Educator who has over a decade of experience working with children, including being a classroom teacher. She currently teaches parenting classes in her local area and writes about shifting parenthood from barely surviving to thriving.
How awesome that all your girls loved it, and had such good takeaways from the reading of the book. Yay!