Choose an animal and write a detailed description of it to help the butterfly find it straight away. The baby monkey is missing his mother, something many children will have experienced, and they may even have been lost. Talking to children about their experiences may help children learn some vocabulary relating to feelings such as ‘worry’, ‘anxious’, ‘nervous’ and ‘scared’. Unfortunately, the baby monkey doesn’t give a full description of his mother and so butterfly takes the baby monkey to the wrong animal over and over again. When the baby monkey finally explains that he looks like his mother, the puzzle is nearly solved. While toddlers should share a book with an adult one to one, three- and four-year-olds may enjoy looking at this book in pairs. The illustrations in this book are quite striking and work well alongside the rhyming text. The story is wonderful to read and enjoy simply as it is, or if you want to use the book to inspire some conversation I have always found Burt is quite happy to talk about the friendly characters that Axel Scheffler brings to life in the illustrations. You could use the story to talk about different animals, introduce some mathematics by counting each animals’ legs or do some biology and talk about metamorphosis and the lifecycle of a butterfly. You could also explore language together by describing each other or thinking of a better description for little monkey’s mum.

Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. You could also read the story before a trip or a holiday to discuss with a young child what they should do if they ever do become lost (not a comfortable idea to entertain but it is certainly an important subject to discuss if you feel your little one is old enough). I have read Monkey Puzzle to groups ofchildren many times.It’s a great book to introduce different animals to young children and older children laugh at ‘the twist’ when the butterfly introduces her babies and realises that she needs to look for another monkey. It’s also a story that non native speakers can easily understand, it can help them to learn animal names as well ashow to describe an animal. A fun activity for older children is to choosean animal that hasan attribute that is similar to a monkey, describe the animaland have a friend guess which animal has been chosen. I have also had small groups of children collaborate to writea new version of the story usingdifferent animals. This book can be used to encourage children to look for particular items and to count them. For example, can they spot the crocodile in the river or the caterpillars on the leaves? Or can they find the smallest and largest animals in the story? Monkey puzzle is the tale of a young monkey who searches for his mum with the help of a butterfly. Confusion unfolds as the butterfly uses only the most immediate piece of information when looking for the monkey's mum, for example 'She's big!' declares the monkey 'bigger than me' and using this information the butterfly takes the monkey to an elephant.Look at the patterns and textures on the animals in the story. Investigate what camouflage means and how this helps animals. In the summer, you could also carry out a caterpillar and butterfly hunt and talk to children about their lifecycle. This book can be read with many different ages of children. The publisher suggests an age range of three to seven years, but toddlers will enjoy the illustrations and spotting the animals. This book could also be the starting point for playing puzzles with children. You could hide a picture of the mother monkey using positional language such as ‘next to’ or ‘under’ and encourage the child to find it.

I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs.

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Choose one of the animals on the word mat (see Resources below). Then, make up some clues for a friend to help them identify the animal that you are thinking of. This leads butterfly on a wild goose, or more appropriately to begin with, a wild elephant, chase. Little monkey has to tell him that it isn't his mum and he gives butterfly another clue - 'her tail coils round the trees'.