A Book & A Craft: "The Gruffalo" and a Moving Story Book

Please welcome Khali of little.lovely. as my guest
contributor today! She is sharing a wonderful book called
The Gruffalo and a craft that I have fond memories
of - a moving story book!

“A mouse took a stroll
through the deep dark wood,
A fox saw the mouse
and the mouse looked good.”



The Gruffalo follows a resourceful mouse on his walk
through a deep, dark wood. The mouse encounters
animals along the way and cleverly comes up
with a plan to avoid being eaten.

This book is a favourite in our house for my husband,
children and I. Beautifully written and illustrated, we read
it over and over again. We have read it so many times
now that our children can recite it by heart.

Now that my children don’t need the book read to them,
I created a moving story book so they can
retell the story to each other.

Moving Gruffalo Story Book

You’ll need:
*Cereal Box
*2 x Cardboard tubes (toilet rolls or paper towel tubes)
*Paper
*Pen
*Items to decorate box
*Glue
*2 x plastic milk bottle lids (optional)



Directions:

Step one: Draw characters from your book onto a piece
of paper. If you’re not good at drawing, you can
photocopy pictures from your book.

Step two: Take your cereal box and cut a window in the
front of the box and an opening in the side, as shown.

Step three: Place cardboard tubes inside box. About 3cm
of tube should be able to be seen over the top of the box.
If your tubes aren’t long enough, consider pushing two
tubes together as shown.

Step four: Create a long strip of paper that is high
enough to easily sit inside the inside of your box window
without slipping through. The strip of paper will also need
to be long enough to create a loop around the two tubes
inserted into your box. The paper loop must be snug
enough to grip onto the tubes.

Step five: Cut out your characters and stick them along
the loop in chronological order.

Step six: Place loop over cardboard tubes inside your
box. If you find that your cardboard tubes keep slipping,
attach plastic milk bottle lids to the base of your box and
slip the tubes over them. This will keep your
tubes in place.

Step seven: Decorate the outside of your box.

Step eight: Now turn the tops of the paper tubes and
watch as your book characters move across
the front of your window!



We’re big readers in our house, so our list of
favourite books is very long. Some of our
current favourites include:

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Time for Bed by Mem Fox
Man Gave Names to All the Animals by Bob Dylan
Two Frogs by Chris Wormell
Where's My Teddy? By Jez Alborough

A former advertising director, Khali is now the mother
of two and the author of little.lovely, an up-and-coming
children's design blog.

Thank you, Khali! To see the rest of the books and
crafts in this series click the button below!