Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day!

Ruth Graves Wakefield, who co-owned the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, published the first recipe for a Toll House chocolate crunch cookie in 1938.

Celebrating fun days like this can vary the language and routine in your household, providing different opportunities to incorporate speech and language.

Here are a few ways you can celebrate National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, not to be confused with National Cookie Day December 4.

Read about cookies

Whether you snuggle up before bedtime or read together outside, reading to children helps them develop listening, rhyming and pre-literacy skills.  Here are a few books that feature chocolate chip cookies:

If You Give A Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff

The Cookie Fiasco by Dan Santat, a Caldecott Medal Winner.

Watch the cookie by Nancy Cote

Play a game about cookies

Do you know “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?”  This teaches turn taking and rhyming. Gather a group in a circle, and if you just two people, be sure to add pets, stuffed animals or dolls. The more the merrier! Place a cookie (real or pretend) in front of the adult.

Parent: Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? Child’s name stole the cookie from the cookie jar. (Place the cookie in front of the child.)

Child: Who me?

Parent: Yes, you?

Child: Couldn’t be.

Parent: Then who?

Child: Ducky stole the cookie from the cookie jar. (Move cookie to new cookie thief, then continue the pattern.)

Bake chocolate chip cookies

Make the original Toll House chocolate chip crunch cookie published in 1938, your family’s fave recipe or a slice and bake chocolate chip cookies.

Getting kids in the kitchen teaches sequencing, measuring and comparison skills (is a ¼ cup measurement more or less than a 1/3 cup measurement?)

Eat cookies

Be sure to enjoy a cookie today. If baking cookies at home isn’t an option or you’re looking for an adventure, then these places are offering a complimentary chocolate chip cookie.

DoubleTree Hotel: No purchase or reservation is necessary. Guests receive a warm chocolate cookie but on August 4 everyone can enjoy a complimentary cookie. 

Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip: No purchase necessary.

Houlihan’s: Purchase lunch or dinner at the restaurant on August 4 and receive a complimentary chocolate chip cookie for dessert.

However you celebrate, be sure to enjoy a chocolate chip cookie on August 4

Speech-language pathologist Jann Fujimoto, MS CCC-SLP, prefers making chocolate chip pan cookies because they are less work than making round chocolate chip cookies.  She is the owner of SpeechWorks, which provides speech-language therapy services to children in the Lake Country at offices in Oconomowoc and Waukesha, Wisconsin.