Picture books -Gorilla

By: Maja Berntsen

Picture books is something that most people do not think about as a vital part of literature, when in fact, it can be used in many different ways!

In this blogpost I am going to talk about how you can use the book Gorilla in your lessons.

Gorilla is a picture book by Anthony Browne, first published in 1983. The story is about Hannah, a little girl who loves gorillas. We follow her one mysterious night when she goes on adventures with a gorilla to all the places she wants to go with her dad.

Looking at the book, you might think that it is not much to it and that it just looks like a silly children’s book. That is where you are wrong! There is a lot you can do with this book when it comes to teaching. You could obviously just read the story to your pupils and show them the pictures, or you could spend some more time on it by using pre-reading strategies, discussing the pictures, looking at colours, discussing the story and the meaning of it.

Discussing the front page before reading the story is a good pre-reading strategy. You could start a discussion by asking questions such as “Why do you think there is a gorilla in the picture?”, “Who is the girl?”, “Where do you think they are going?”, “What are they doing outside in the middle of the night?”. There are lots of questions you can ask to make the pupils start to think.

Further on after the pupils has gotten to know the story you can compare different images. A good example to use is the picture of Hannah and her Dad at the breakfast table in one of the first pages and the picture of Hannah and the gorilla at the table with all the cakes and sweets later in the book. 

In the picture of Hannah and her dad, the colours that are used are cold and blue whilst in the image with her and the gorilla consists of warmer colours like orange and red. How does the use of colours connect to Hannah’s relationship with her dad?

Making the pupils go treasure hunting after gorillas in the images is something that the pupils might find fun, depending on how old they are. The book is filled with hidden gorillas throughout. You could do this whilst you read the story out loud to make sure that they are actually paying attention to the images.

After we have been working with picture books, I am now aware that they can be very useful when it comes to teaching and I will definitely be using them in the future!

Sources:

Browne. A (1983) - Gorilla – Walker books Ltd