Customer Reviews

Inside Mouse, Outside Mouse

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I share this book with my three year old to help her learn from the abundance of directional terms found in the story. Directional terms such as up and down are part of early math.

The book features beautiful illustrations and can almost be read as two separate stories brought together at the end where the mice meet. For almost the entirety of the story, the tale does not truly flow, but rather the inside mouse mirrors what the outside mouse is doing, only in a different setting.

It's lots of fun and truly a unique way of accomplishing many things within one book. We enjoy it.

The main characters in the story are 2 mice. On lives inside and the other outside. Each of them are shown going about their day. They do lots of the same things but encounter different objects in their routines.

The book would make a great teaching tool for the concept of compare/contrast

This book would be nice to read aloud to kids ages 4-6. There are very few word per page keeping the attention of little ones well.

Mice always seem to capture the imaginations of toddlers and young readers. There's certainly no exception here, as Lindsay Barrett George's _Inside Mouse, Outside Mouse_ introduces two cute mice who go on a journey. The inside mouse lives inside the house while the outside mouse lives out in the yard of the house. Each mouse travels to meet the other. They finally meet in the middle--on the window sill of the house, with the inside mouse looking out at the outside mouse and vice versa. Each mouse must journey through different terrain, but each's journey mirrors the other.

The illustrations are fanciful and add to the cleverness of the story. I read this story to my three year-old, and I'm sure he appreciates the story for the wonderful pictures, cute mice, and story. Yet there is more to the illustrations that older readers will appreciate. The inside mouse runs up a bat to get to the window wile the outside mouse runs up a garden hose. The outside mouse runs in front of a bird while the inside mouse runs in front of a book about birds. As you can guess from the book's title, there are plenty of prepositions, opposites, and directional words in the book that are useful for building vocabularies and understanding the concept of opposites.

The book ends when the two mice meet at the window and say hello to each other. What will they do once they've met? That's up to the imagination of your young reader, but the book contains additional, smaller illustrations in the front and back covers that give children ideas of the fun things that these mice like to do, but lets children provide their own narrative for what will happen next. This is a book that my toddler loves but that I love to read and fancy along with him!

Lots of fun as you watch the inside mouse and outside mouse explore their territories until they come face to face on the opposite sides of the window. A tip for reading this - at the end you can see the whole layout of the inside and outside and it is good to have the child try to identify where the mice had gone on the previous pages which are all close ups. Great book.

My son (18mos) LOVES this book and he has learned SO much vocabulary (from spider to mushroom to bat to hose to about every preposition you can think of) from reading it. The 2 mice in the story are very cute and in the end meet at the window (from either side) and say "HELLO!" That is enough to keep my son wanting to read it again and again. If you have a child that enjoys sitting and talking about the pages of a book, this is a great choice and the illustrations are beautiful.

When trying to get my students to understand what opposites were, I used this story to introduce the idea. We used a 'mouse size' point of view, and the children understood and had great fun with opposites.