Gruffalo Story Tray

Post author:Admin
Post published:April 16, 2014
Post category:bluebell-art-craft

M loves the Gruffalo story at the moment, so this week we were busy making a story tray to encourage the retelling of the story.

We looked at the book and talked about what we would need to include in our tray: gruffalo, trees, stream, owl, logpile house…… We realised we were going to need quite a lot of things! I encouraged M to think about how we could keep track of what we needed to make. Together we came up with the idea of making a list. This provided the opportunity for ‘writing’ for a purpose.

Once we had worked out what we would need we set about making our tray. I tried to keep it as simple as possible as I didn’t want M to become bored before we had finished but it still took us a couple of afternoons to get finished, while the little ones were napping. I had pre-selected an assortment of resources we could possibly use and had planned to allow M to lead. However this is the first time we have done anything like this and the activity turned out to be more adult guided than I would have liked. But hopefully the more practise M has, the more his confidence will develop.

Still I encouraged M to make the resources himself, with a bit of support where needed.

First he drew round the tray so we could line it with card.

Then we got busy making the trees from crepe paper and tubes.

We looked at our list and added a stream and pathway to our tray.

The we created Fox’s underground house from an empty food packet….

,,,snakes logpile house from logs. I said to M that he could use the glue gun to stick the logs together. As I explained to him the parts of the gun that would get hot, I looked up to find he had taken about 10 paces back!! He then took a bit of convincing that it would be ok to use and he wouldn’t get hurt.

With snake’s house made we were just about done. We used the tree from our Christmas sensory tray for owls house and then just needed to find our characters from the story props box.