This craft makes a beautiful hallway display to pair with one of my favorite read-alouds for kindergarten, preschool, or first grade students – The Gruffalo written by Julia Donaldson. I’m also sharing how you can grab some of my favorite printables to go along with this story!
I LOVE THE GRUFFALO! Seriously, I really love The Gruffalo story by Julia Donaldson. She is such an amazing author and has my kids totally mesmerized with her stories. I am so proud of this resource I made to go along with a unit study about this fantastic book. I spent so long making sure I included every fun and engaging activity I could and it meets many state standards. You can grab it by clicking on the product cover below:
(Not in the mood to read? You can also watch a free video explanation of my resource on TPT by clicking below!)
Gruffalo’s Activity Explanation Video
Back to the blog, if you don’t have the book yet, you can grab one on Amazon by clicking on this photo. It is totally worth the investment! I use the library for many of my book studies but this is one that I would definitely want in my classroom.
That Gruffalo is just so cute I can’t take it! I didn’t mention this in my last blog post but there is a movie that goes right along with the book. I love that my students have rarely seen it and the animation is fantastic. Its around 30 minutes- perfect for the end of the day. I recently made my husband sit down and watch it. He argued that he didn’t have time to watch it but then got totally sucked in. At the time I wrote this blog post, you can view the movie free if you have Amazon Prime. The DVD is so fantastic that you won’t regret buying it if you want a copy for yourself. You can click on the picture below to purchase from Amazon.
My kids were thrilled when I told them that we would be building our own big Gruffalos. The template is in my TPT resource. We started by painting the body. You could always cut this out on colored paper or just let your kids color it instead of paint. I never mind getting messes out in my room though.
I wasn’t too worried about the kids smoothing it out because I just thought the strokes made it look even hairier.
And now.. the finished products! They are so adorable and the kids were SO PROUD!!! Remember that you can grab the templates for these in my TPT resource by clicking the product cover above.
We completed several writing assignments. These are all available in my resource on TPT. The kids really loved this one in which they had to design their own Gruffalos. (This was actually color word practice disguised as a fun activity:)) I included 4 different versions of this so you could work on more advanced descriptive words as desired.
The kids were able to choose what colors to write and then design their own Gruffalos accordingly on the other page.
There are some other writing prompts included as well. I asked my students to tell me about their favorite part in the story. You could use whatever prompt you like with the included writing page.
(The Gruffalo is brown but he has whiskers.)
(My favorite part is when the mouse says walk behind me.)
(My favorite part was when the fox went in the underground house.)
I included some descriptive words that are perfect for a hallway display. The template for this huge Gruffalo is not included. My awesome assistant Mel came up with him. Even the “poisonous wart on the end of his nose” is 3D! Anyways, you could get a similar effect by projecting a picture of him on the wall and creating something like this. If you don’t, the wall cards would look cute around your class’ Gruffalos.
This hallway display has gotten lots of “oohs” & “aahhs” from the younger students. Something about the display just makes me happy!
In the next blog post I posted pics of our “Gruffalo crumble” & measurement activity! You can click the pics below to head to the next one.
If you didn’t get a chance yet, you can click on the picture below to read my first blog post about how I introduced the book, the puppets we made, and our homemade play dough Gruffalos!
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