Activities and ideas for a substitute teacher to use in the classroom using the Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson.

The Gruffalo is my favourite children's story.  I just love it and can't get enough of it. I found some fun activities on the internet, to do in the classroom, after you read the story to the kiddos. You can use the activities for all ages. Just adjust the level of difficulty.

1.  Listen activity: Give each student an outline of the Gruffalo. They need to follow the instructions of the teacher: 

• Colour the eyes orange.
• Colour the prickles purple.
• Colour his tongue black.
• Draw a mouse in front of the gruffalo.
• Draw grass underneath him.
• Draw the sun in the right top corner. 
• Colour the body brown. 

2.  Draw and label your gruffalo. Use the following words to help you.
      Tusks, claws, jaws, knees, toes, wart, eyes, tongue, prickles.
      You can also use the outline of the Gruffalo to label the different parts.

 

3.  Create your own monster. Draw it on an A4 or A3 paper. Give it a name, what does it eat, where does it live?

4.   Fill in worksheet or the students can copy the coloumns from the board. (I will make the worksheet available on a later date.)

Answers are in red

Characters	Where they live	Asked the mouse to join them for:
Fox	Underground house	Lunch
Owl	Tree top house	Tea
Snake	Logpile house	Feast

5.  Act out the gruffalo story in groups.  Students can make their own props or use templates. Here's a mask of the Gruffalo that I found on the official website of the Gruffalo.

6.  Add one more animal to the story. Fill in the blanks.

A mouse took a stroll through a deep dark wood. A _________________ saw a mouse and the mouse looked good.                        (animal) “Where are you going to, little brown mouse? Come and have __________________ in my ______________ house.”                                         (description of food)                          (type of house) “It’s _______________ kind of you, _______________,  but no –        (adjective/describing word)                                     (same animal) I’m going to have ________________ with a gruffalo.                                     (decription of food) Draw a picture of your animal.

Example:

A mouse took a stroll through a deep dark wood. A tiger saw a mouse and the mouse looked good.  “Where are you going to, little brown mouse? Come and have brunch in my jungle tree house.”                                    “It’s awfully kind of you, tiger but no –     I’m going to have brunch with a gruffalo.                                   Draw a picture of your animal.

7. Change all the adjectives: Let the students first underline all the adjectives with a colour. Now they need to come up with new adjectives for their gruffalo.  Give students an outline of the gruffalo, they can now colour the gruffalo using their adjectives or they can draw their own gruffalo.

But who is this creature with terrible claws And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws? He has knobbly knees and turned-out toes And, a poisonous wart at the end of his nose. His eyes are orange and his tongue is black; He has purple prickles all over his back.

8. Using paper plates, let the students draw a picture of what they think the gruffalo’s favourite food looks like.

·         Scrambled snake

·         Owl ice-cream

·         Roasted fox

·         Make their own (they can use the animal they used for activity 6, ex. Tiger soup

I hope you find some of these activities useful and fun!

 

Activities and ideas using the book BALONEY (Henry P) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

 

Kids of all ages love stories.  I love using story books while teaching.  It makes a lesson fun.

You can find hundreds of different activities using story books on the internet.  I found some great ideas form other blogs and websites and would like to share some of them.

At the moment I am a Casual Relief Teacher and using stories just makes my life easier to come up with ideas when the teacher has not provided any work for the day.

You can use story books like BALONEY in all grades and not only for the younger ones. Just adjust the level of difficulty.

Baloney Henry P

Teaching about CONTEXT CLUES.

Definition: Information (such as a definition, synonym, antonym, or example) that appears near a word or phrase and offers direct or indirect suggestions about its meaning.

Helps determine the meaning of the unknown words and build your comprehension and vocabulary.

 How?

•   Use other words in the sentence to discover the meaning.
•  Use the illustrations of pictures.

1. Read the story to the children.
2. Now explain to them that words that we don’t understand are used in the story. Give an example using the first unknown word in the story ‘zimulis’.
3. Read the story again and write all the unknown words underneath each other on the board in one colour.
4. Let them guess what the first word means and write those words down on a sticky note. 
5.  Ask them how can we figure out what the word means and give them some clues given above.
6.  They will hopefully answer ‘pencil’ and give the ‘íllustration’reason.
7.  Now read the story again and write the meanings of all the words next to the unknown words on the board in a different colour. 
8.  They can have their own paper and pencils and write the words down as you read if you want them to do something while sitting on the carpet.
9. Now see if the story makes 'sense'.

Other activities using the story book:

·         Year 1 – 3

o   Give each learner a template of an alien. They can colour it in and decorate it, cut and paste on another sheet.Template - alien body

o   Now they have to come up with another reason their alien was late for school.  They should use one nonsense word which can be figured out using context clues given in their sentence. This is a great idea and I found it at this blogpost.

o   Some children may find it a bit difficult, but give some ideas and clues and explain a little bit more until they understand what to do.

·         Year 4 – 6

o   Design/create your own alien. Come up with a name, character traits, place where he/she lives, what he likes to eat etc. You can have a class discussions or group discussions at the end of the activity. This activity can also be used for Year 1 – 3.

o   Write your own story or write a story together with a friend using nonsense words and context clues.

o   The story ends with, “I seem to have misplaced my zimulis”. Let the students write some ideas or a story about where the zimulis may be.

o   Ask the students if they can remember what the assignment for today was in the story.  Tell them that they also need to compose a tall tale. Show them the tall tales PowerPoint or discuss what tall tales are before the start.

Things to remember

Today I am grateful for this privilege life I have.