THE GRUFFALO
Hands up if your child’s favourite story is the “Gruffalo”. Well you will not be alone! Here at Stars Woodston we love this imagination capturing, beautifully written story by Julia Donaldson.
The Gruffalo is humorous and has a rhythmical style of writing which encourages children to “think outside the box” and repeat refrains.
The story begins with our hero “Mouse” taking a stroll through “the deep dark woods” meeting all manner of creatures on his travels. These creatures all want to eat Mouse for their lunch. On this journey your child will be encouraged to use their imagination through colourful descriptive language. At the end of his travels Mouse encounters the Gruffalo who then follows him back through “the deep dark woods” as he safely retraces his steps before tricking the Gruffalo into leaving.
So what is this story teaching your child?
We were curious so we asked our little hero’s, here’s what they said:
- “The Gruffalo isn’t that scary” Rio aged 4 and 2 Months
- “Mouse is brave” Helen aged 4 and 2 Months
- “The Gruffalo eat him” Esme aged 2 and 4 months.
The moral of the story is “no matter how big or small you are, with a little bit of thought you can deal with any situation “
The Gruffalo is designed to challenge thinking and can be linked to Piaget’s theory of Schemas. A child may have preconceived ideas that “bigger is better” The mouse turns this on its head through thinking creatively. The child processes this information and modifies their schema with the new information and begins to question whether bigger is better?
We have been inspired to get creative and have had great fun testing making Gruffalo crumble, encouraging teamwork and turn taking. Our fine motor skills have also been developed by threading pasta onto string to make snakes.
Reviewed by Nicola Williams – Stars Preschool Woodston
You can watch a reading of The Gruffalo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8sUPpPc8Ws
And the Gruffalo website has some great ideas and resources for home learning https://www.gruffalo.com/
