Cinco de Mayo Story Time

This story time was a part of a monthly story time play group I organized for kids ages 2-4 years old. You can read more about how I did those and see the other themes we followed here: Story Time Play Groups

We held this story time as close to Cinco de Mayo as we could with our schedules and had a great time celebrating with the kids. I started off by reading these two books:

Cinco de Mouse-O by Judy Cox

The book follows a little mouse who is excited to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and get treats from a Pinata, but a cat that’s prowling after him threatens to ruin everything. The book shows many of the traditional celebrations for the holiday as Mouse weaves his way through all the festivities. Since we did a pinata at our story time this story helped build anticipation for that.

Chicks and Salsa by Aaron Reynolds

This is a fun story about a rooster that gets inspired to make Mexican food. All of the other barn animals follow suit and decide that Mexican dishes would be much more enjoyable than their normal food. As we read it the kids enjoyed saying “Ole!” together each time it came up.

After reading the books we played some Latin music for the kids to dance to, including doing the Mexican Hat Dance together.

For the potluck lunch we ate taquitos and/or quesadillas, guacamole, Mexican rice, and fruit. For dessert my friend made these Tres Leches cupcakes from Mel’s Kitchen Cafe (click the picture to be taken to her recipe)

After lunch we set up a pinata outside and let the kids take turns hitting it until it broke open. Since we were doing it with young kids and we didn’t want an abundance of candy, I bought a pretty small pinata. They still had the full experience and had a great time with it. I bought mine from a local Mexican store and purposely got a burro one so it looked like the one in the Cinco-de-Mouse-O book.