What Is A Grumpalump? (The Grumpalump - Sarah Hayes)

Member Name: belfin

Product:	The Grumpalump - Sarah Hayes
Date:	16/07/08 (149 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent rhyming book

Disadvantages: none

***Background***

My son has now finished for the summer holidays but from Christmas he has been getting a weekend project home and this was the first book that featured in one of these special packages. More about that later though, as this book is written by Sarah Hayes who is also responsible for creating the This Is The Bear series.

Barbara Firth takes care of the illustrations in this book.

***The Story***

The book starts with a bear and a lump.

"The bear stared at the grumpalump.
The lump grumped."

As you go through the book, more animals appear and each one does an action that rhymes with their name. The cat sat and the dove shoved but all the lump does is grump.

Eventually a gnu appears and blew at the grumpalump. The lump gets bigger and bigger until we see that there is a lot more to it that just a big lump.

The story ends as we find out what the grumpalump actually is.

"The gnu drew breath and clambered in.
The grumpalump began to grin.
'I'm off on a trip in my hot airship,'
said the gnu, and flew.
Absolutely true."

***The Illustrations***

The pictures in this book are quite simply drawn and the colours are set off against a mainly white background, where the lettering is big and black. The pictures are quite amusing throughout although it is the text that really makes this book a bit special.

***My Thoughts***

I'm a great fan of books that have a rhyming element to them, as I feel that they have great learning potential. Young children can often memorise the rhyming bits and feel like they are able to contribute to the story telling.

Of course my son is starting to be able to read most of his books by himself and as I said he came home with this book along with some other games that went with it from the school. The point of this is to try to get children remembering what's in the story and even without these aids which I believe are only available as part of the schools system, you can adapt this type of game for any book of this type.

The first game suggests that the child tries to remember the order the animals appeared with them telling you what came first, second etc and the other game tries to test their memory by getting them to say the action that each animal takes.

All this is great for encouraging children to take an interest in books and helping them to understand that although some words have the same sound even though they have different word endings. This is particularly helpful in conjunction with the Phonics system of learning to read where sounding out words is what is important.

My son was able to tell me the story all the way through and the only word he was a bit unsure about was gnu, which you would think would be simple but of course it doesn't have a normal sound. He was helped to figure it out though by using the word blew as a guide, as he had realised that all the animals and their actions had rhymed. This deduction is an important part of understanding language for a child and should definitely be encouraged.

If you have a child who loves rhyming books or is just learning to read then this book has to be highly recommended from me.

***Other Books By Sarah Hayes***

This Is The Bear & The Picnic Lunch
This Is The Bear & The Scary Night
This Is The Bear & The Bad Little Girl
Eat Up Gemma
True Story Of Humpty Dumpty
Mary Mary

***Price & Availability***

This paperback isn't as easily available to find in the version that we have at the moment but is available in a new format from stores such as WH Smith or Amazon at only £2.99.

ISBN No. 0744548985

Summary: My son loved this one almost as much as I did, lol.