Gruffalo's Child Small World

This wintry small world is based on the story of The Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson. It is a story that we have enjoyed as a family and my two always love predicting who has made the footprints in the snow. This Gruffalo’s Child small world idea is a great opportunity for children to reenact and retell the story in their own words.

Set Up

So this activity does take a little more set up than the others I normally do. I created my own animal footprints but will be able to reuse these for many other activities. I used my own home made play dough but you can of course use shop bought play dough. I didn’t have any of the animals from the original story apart from the mouse but thought we could adapt the story and make it our own by changing the animals. So we had a penguin’s child instead! Lots of toy animals actually make quite good footprints themselves but as ours don’t I thought I would make some footprints. For the footprints I used wood slices and a glue gun. I used the glue to create the foot print shape. It doesn’t need to be perfect at all to make an effective footprint. Then I simply added pebbles, wood slices and some greenery from the garden to make our snowy woodland.

They were both very intrigued and before I had even got in the room they were both making footprints. They both tried to use the toy animals first before M asked me how I had made my footprints. Once I showed her the wood slices she carried on making more footprints. Then they both started making more imprints with the other objects I had left around including the shells.

Once they had made enough footprints they both decided to take an animal each and start “acting” out the story. F mainly stomped her character around in the snow, whilst M added her own narrative and lines from the original story. This wintry Gruffalo’s Child themed small world was such a hit and I was impressed with their creativity and their imaginations too. Lots of fun and kept them busy for quite some time.