Gruffalo Activity

Gruffalo Activity

Gruffalo Activity:  The Gruffalo is a fantastic story (and movie available to watch on Netflix).  It’s all about a mouse that in order to save himself from predators in the forest, he describes a “Gruffalo.” This scares the animals enough that they leave him alone.  The mouse is doing well until he comes face to face with a Gruffalo!  What he does next is clever enough to save his life and entertains kids.  I used this story in my latest presentation for SDE entitled, “Read Aloud, Think Aloud” and thought it would be a great story to share with you along with some of the activities I did with my kinders.

You can find The Gruffalo on Amazon I started the lesson with predictions and made sure to cover the picture of the Gruffalo on the cover with a large Post-It note.  Then as we read, anytime the story provided a detail about the Gruffalo, I added it to a list on the board.   I stopped midway and we went to our desks and drew what we thought the Gruffalo looked like.  We referred to the list as we drew.

Next we finished the story and my kids finally got to see what the Gruffalo looks like! We compared that to our drawings.  As I read, any unknown words were given a quick explanation of and then are discussed in detail the next day using vocabulary cards.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, it’s all about going back and reading the story, focusing on the vocabulary words. You can get the vocabulary cards on google drive.

Wednesday

On Wednesday, we dug deeper and talked about how the illustrations help us understand the story.  We also discussed the roles of predator and prey.  We focused on the faces of the predators before and after the description of the Gruffalo.

Thursday

On Thursday, it was all about re-tell and used masks found on SparkleBox.

I also added these spoon puppets I painted to a station.  I love how they turned out!

Friday

On Friday, we created (high level learning!) our own Gruffalos that would scare away predators.  We labeled them, too!

I hope you have enjoyed this peek into my week with The Gruffalo!  Keep in mind there are actually two Gruffalo movies.  The second movie is about the Gruffalo’s child who is in search of the “scary” mouse!  Check them out and be sure to buy the book!  You won’t regret it because it’s a fantastic read aloud!