Activities for Family Literacy Night (Plus a FREEBIE!)


At our school, each year we host a family literacy night during the week of the book fair. Each teacher chooses a story and then picks 1 or 2 quick literacy activities that relate to the story for students to do. We have tables set up in the hallway and students can go from table to table with their families doing whichever activities they choose. 

Each I year a pick the same book. It's an oldie but a goodie, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie."

Here is an example of my little set up, inside my classroom. 


I have the story (of course) and my little stuffed mouse. Although my mouse is wearing red overalls? Maybe he is a knockoff ;)


For my activities, I have this cookie memory game


I drew chocolate chips (aka brown blobs) on one side of brown construction paper circles and glued letters on the other side. Students play this like the traditional memory game, flipping over 2 cookies at a time, saying the letter, and trying to find a match. 

Although I chose to put letters on these cookies so I would have a higher and lower activity, you could put letters and letter sounds, sight words, or even a vocabulary word from the story and a picture of the word for students who are reading. The possibilities are endless! 

 My other activity was play-doh stamping vocabulary words from the story. 


Play-doh stamps are always a big hit in my classroom and the children at family literacy night seemed to love the stamping words just as much as my students! I was fortunate enough to get my stamps through a literacy project funded by Donors Choose. You can find the stamps through Lakeshore here.

I have been using the same vocabulary cards for 4 or 5 years now and I cannot find the source ANYWHERE! I searched high and low for them and still came up empty handed :( 

Since I could only find the few cards I use during family literacy night and needed more picture cards to help retell the story in class, I created my own set of cards as a forever FREEBIE in my store. 


This set includes 15 different words from the story. You can click on the pictures above or click here to download a set of your own!

Do you have family literacy night at your school what kind of activities do you do? 

1 comment

  1. I love the Family Literacy idea, is there any way you could email me more details how to create one for 20 students? Thank you in advance

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