In this story, we meet the little brown mouse taking a stroll through the deep dark woods. He has clever conversations with the fox, owl and snake who want to eat him and successfully escapes from danger.
The detailed illustrations show us that even in this scary situation, the mouse is positively cheerful, smiling broadly as he faces the fox.
The mouse invents an imaginary creature, the gruffalo, to scare off the predators. The fox, owl and snake are taken aback by the confident little mouse, as they have never heard of a gruffalo. You feel the mouse’s optimism when he asks them with a grin
“A gruffalo! Why, didn’t you know?”
He goes on to describe his made-up creature bit by bit to each predator. There are wonderful alliterations in this part of the text, our favourite being
“He has purple prickles all over his back”.
The little mouse doesn’t forget to mention to each animal that they are the gruffalo’s favourite food and they scurry off in fear.
“Silly old Owl! Doesn’t he know, there’s no such thing as a gruffalo?”
Finally, he meets his imaginative creature face to face. After an initial shock, the clever mouse recovers and his quick clever brain comes up with an amazing plan to evade the gruffalo too!
The rhymes and repetitions are so good, we reread this one till we could recite it off by heart! Loved the beautiful illustrations and enjoyed looking through the pictures for little creatures like squirrels, dragonflies, frogs, and mushrooms.
Try this word search with words from the book.
INSTRUCTIONS: When you find a word, click on the first letter and slide over to the last letter, and click again! Find all 9 words!!
[game-wordsearch id=”1620″ ]
Suggested age: Read aloud to 3+. Read by self 5+. Recommended for an intermediate to confident reader.
