Playing With Words 365

Educating, inspiring, and empowering parents & professionals in supporting young children's overall development

The Gruffalo: Product Reviews and a Giveaway!

by Filed Under: Books and Literacy Activities, Giveaways, Product Reviews, Therapy Ideas and Activities, Therapy Materials and Product Recomendations 72 Comments

Disclaimer: The items reviewed in this post were supplied to me by the great people at The Gruffalo for me to review and keep at no cost. The opinions and thoughts are mine alone. This post contains affiliate links. 

The Gruffalo Review & Giveaway

Last week I shared some fun activities we did to go along with The Gruffalo. Today I’m going to share some additional actrivities we did to go along with the Gruffalo thanks to the wonderful people at The Gruffalo! They teamed up with several of the Virtual Book Club for Kids hosts this month to host some great product reviews and giveaways of their products that go along with the book. Here is what we did!

We Watched The Gruffalo: The Movie

The Gruffalo Movie is a short film (approx 30 minutes) based on the book. After reading the book every night for over a week, my kids were pretty stoked to find out that there was a film version! This sweet film is narrated by the actress Helena Bonham Carter and basically follows the book very closely. My children LOVED it, and in fact watched it twice the first day we had it. I love the simple and soothing background music and the overall calm vibe the film has.

We Played The Gruffalo Rhyming Card Game

Another box my daughter couldn’t WAIT to open was the The Gruffalo Rhyming Card Game. This game is actually TWO games! The first is the Gruffalo Word Rhyming Game is a fun little game where you work on finding the matching rhyming words. There are directions for the game included in the cards, and we also used the cards to play Go Fish for rhyming words. My daughter and I really enjoyed the games and I think the game would work well in a small group speech session as well! In the second game, There is No Such Thing as a Graffalo, the object is to collect all the cards in your “family” or in other words, all the animals in the story. This one is also fun and would be a great one for a small speech session. Both games are intended for 2-4 players for ages 4 and up. My daughter is 4 and I would say that 4 is the youngest I would play these games for sure.

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We Played with The Gruffalo Fun Pocket

Gruffalo Fun Pocket Travel Play Kit is a Colorform set. It includes two picture scenes (not identical but similar) and two sets of Colorform Stickies (each contains the basic characters of the stories and then some other items like flowers, bugs, mushrooms, etc). Both my kids loved these and enjoyed playing with them. My daughter made up stories as she went! I plan on getting a second set, which would then give me two complete sets of barrier games that I can use in therapy sessions as barrier games and for use in narrations/storytelling skills! As for home use, the great travel size makes them ideal to throw in your bag to take to restaurants to keep the littles busy as you wait for your food 😉

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A Giveaway!

Now that you have had the chance to read my post about The Gruffalo as well as the reviews of these products, how would you like to win some! The great people at Gruffalo will be giving one of my readers here a copy of The Gruffalo book and the Gruffalo DVD! All you need to do is use the Rafflecopter below to enter. Giveaway is open to US residents with mailing addresses in the US ages 18 and over only. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Giveaway open through Monday April 1st at 11:59pm pacific standard time. Please read the full Giveaway Rules in the Rafflecopter Widget before entering. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

About Katie

Katie is a licensed, credentialed and certified pediatric speech-language pathologist and mom to four (8, 6, 3 and 6 months). Her passion for educating, inspiring and empowering parents of children with all abilities led her to start her blog playing with words 365 where she shares information about speech & language development & intervention strategies, parenting, photography and a little about her family life too. Katie has been working in the field of speech pathology for 12 years and is certified in The Hanen Centre’s It Takes Two to Talk ® and Target Word ® programs and holds a certificate in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). In addition to blogging and being a mommy, Katie works part time in her small private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can follow her on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.

Comments

  1. Maria says

    I love the idea of turning the Travel Kit into a barrier game!! I particularly like using barrier games with my preschool/early elementary fluency kiddos. Thanks for the great ideas and introducing me to this talented author!

    Reply

  17. Trina says

    We love the Gruffalo book! My son recently received the book as a birthday gift and we love owning it! The rhyming card game looks awesome!

    Reply

  19. marianne says

    This story looks like a lot of fun. you have shared some great ideas I can use in the classroom and share with my SLP. Thanks!

    Reply

  21. Heidi says

    I love the book and have ever since being introduced to it on a trip to England over 3 years ago.The travel play kit looks like fun as well:-)

    Reply

  24. Ruthanne says

    What a great idea. I so like the use of fun when trying to accomplish something! It would be great to win, but I am also going to be looking for these products!

    Reply

  28. Colby says

    I really like the fun pocket travel play kit, and I would love to use it as a barrier game with my students!

    Reply

  29. rebecca houston says

    i would love to apply some social skills to this story for my older kids and the the rhyming game for my younger crowd

    Reply

  30. Jennifer says

    Te gruffalo is the only book my non- book loving son will read. He is in speech therapy and we really appreciate your activities for this book!

    Reply

  35. Robin says

    This would be a wonderful addition to the Little Faces Childcare center! Would love to give it to my little friends. On another web page, I found a printable mask that we could use to pretend to be the Gruffalo. What fun!

    Reply

  36. Carrie walls says

    We did a March is Reading Month assembly at school. Teachers and classrooms read their favorite books. This was one of them. It was the first time I had heard of The Gruffalo! Would love to win this!

    Reply

  40. Lynnette Watkins says

    My 3 yr old and 5 yr old love the books. Both of them were first introduce to the Grufflo books in school. Now we read them at home.

    Reply

  48. Nicole says

    I’ve been wanting to get this DVD and book for my boys for awhile now. Thanks for the chance to win it!

    Reply

  50. Heather says

    I love love this book (and many of her others too!) and had no idea there were other materials besides the book and DVD. The fun pocket looks like a super addition.

    Reply

  58. Anna Montmayeur says

    My favorite Gruffalo item has been the finger puppet printouts from the Gruffalo website. I laminated them and glued them to Popsicle sticks. My son plays with them a lot and acts out the scenes from the book. They have been a great free toy!

    Reply

  65. Bambie says

    I love the printouts of the Gruffalo characters. My 4 year old has a blast using them as stick puppets!

    Reply

  68. Tara says

    We LOVE Julia Donaldson and all of her books, We too, have discovered the Gruffalo and the sequel, the Gruffalo’s Child. My 3 year old wants to read that one first all that time!

    Reply

  70. Sandra Goldstein says

    I am so bummed that I missed out the contest, but thank you so much for the informative article. The Gruffalo games and movie sound like loads of fun! I work with preschool students (ages 3 and 4) and they would love the story and then to watch the DVD. I think the 4 year olds would benefit from playing the barrier games with our classroom assistant during centers. I could build on the lesson by introducing the rhyming cards since they go along with the story. It would be great to build a whole lesson around Gruffalo. I think our students would enjoy it as much as your daughter has!

    Reply

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