Gigantosaurus

Product Information

A set of seven workshhets involving work on rhyme, capitalisation, writing questions, big/small vocabulary, sequencing words in muddled sentences, picture sequencing and caption writing. All in all this is a good conversation piece for teaching children what can happen when we are dishonest and how being dishonest can take away the trust others bestow upon us. The last two pages of the book gives some information about each of the dinosaurs encountered throughout the story.

I appreciate the rhythm of the text but there are some boo-boos (but nothing that will really distract kids or puzzle a reader). Four little dinosaurs are playing outside, but their mothers have warned them to watch out for the Gigantosaurus.We got it from the library and out of the stack of books we checked out, this one always gets put on the top of the pile to read first. As a rule, the problem with rhythmic stories for children – which you notice when you’re reading them out loud over and over again – is that you often find that you want to add or remove words to retain a more poetic flow than the original. The Gruffalo was one of the only books I’ve read where that isn’t the case, though unfortunately that level of attention wasn’t repeated in all the other books by Julia Donaldson.

The story is very much based on Aesop Fable ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ and has some funny, if not a little dark, turns, which are very quickly followed by a happy resolve. is a bumper year for Arena Illustration with no less than 4 of our contributors featuring on this year’s collection of World Book Day Books. But it's not Gigantosaurus, just Bonehead's idea of a joke, and when he takes the joke a bit too far, he's the one on Gigantosaurus' lunch menu! I also really like that at the end of the book there are a few pages dedicated to meeting the dinosaurs from the book with the dinosaurs names and a little fact about each of them. Bonehead scares his friends couple of times by screaming that the Gigantosaurus is coming, friends hide, Bonehead laughs at them that he tricked them and tells them they are stupid.As an illustrator myself, I have to admit that I’ve not been that wowed by digital art for children, but this one demonstrates that if you know what you’re doing you can create the depth and detail that usually only comes from physicalart. Life is always an adventure: new volcanoes are popping up all the time, long-necked brachiosauruses and enormous triceratopses roam free, meteor showers light up the night sky and… Gigantosaurus, the biggest, fiercest dinosaur reigns over it all!

I actually felt kind of bad for young Bonehead because unlike the wolf story where the child is being willfully untruthful, Bonehead simply mistakes other large animals for the Gigantosaurus. If you read my review all the way to the end, you can check out an alternate ending to this book that I just thought of: Instead of Bonehead getting "eaten", his friends get taken by the Gigantosaurus because they didn't believe him to run away.All young dinosaurs are warned about the scary Gigantosaurus so Bonehead volunteers to be the dino-kids lookout.