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Gillian McClure has written many books for children – you might recognise Selkie – and her most recent one Don’t Eat Granny is a fresh and fun look at punctuation.  Red Hoodie shines a new light on a traditional tale but she, granny and the wolf find themselves rather mixed up when commas and full stops end up in the wrong places.

If you’re teaching punctuation, Don’t Eat Granny introduces the main elements of punctuation and cleverly illustrates what a misplaced punctuation mark might do to a sentence.  Gillian kindly shared with us how the book came about, what she considered when writing and illustrating and what she hopes young readers (and their teachers) might take from the story…

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I wrote Don’t Eat Granny for six-year-old twins, Magnus and Bjorn, when they were learning about the first four punctuation marks in KS1.  They came home from school one day very excited about these punctuation marks and asking for stories about them. It must have been a very inspiring punctuation lesson!  As they enjoyed jokes, I thought I’d introduce them to punctuation jokes and created a story full of them.  Here’s one that comes at the start of the book when the reader sees a little girl, Red Hoodie, trying to write a story about herself, her granny and a wolf, along the lines of the well-known story of Little Red Riding Hood. This is what she writes:

 ‘Red Hoodie is going to visit Granny in her bag.
Red Hoodie has a cake, cookies and candy.’

Red Hoodie has put the full stop in the wrong place!  Her sentence takes on a different meaning and there’s an illustration showing poor Granny’s head poking out of her black handbag.

‘I can’t see how to put it right. Please someone help me!’  Red Hoodie calls out, and four little punctuation characters arrive on the page only to become caught up in the action.

Don’t Eat Granny was a tricky book to write.  I needed to keep the narrative as simple as possible for the picture book age while weaving in a punctuation theme.  So, I came up with the idea of having Red Hoodie’s story in her own handwriting to distinguish it from the dialogue on the page when the punctuation characters arrive to put things right. Handwriting, I believe, is a current issue in education when so many children type on screens rather than use a pen or pencil.  The reader can take comfort that Red Hoodie’s writing isn’t perfect but at least she’s writing with a pencil!

Don’t Eat Granny is a story within a story where the reader can see Red Hoodie on the page either commenting on her story or peeping over the page fearing what is going to happen next. The illustrations, in watercolour, are mostly vignettes and they add to Red Hoodie’s handwritten narrative and show the outcome of the punctuation jokes. I decided to create the punctuation characters with expressions but not limbs and I used a purple swirl to highlight them whenever they appear on the page.

The twins checked out my story while I was writing it and said I should have the question mark saying  ‘Why am I an S? on the page where the little punctuation characters are seen upside down and the wrong way round after being dropped by the wolf.

A year later, a strange coincidence happened when Magnus’ KS2 teacher put the sentence ‘Don’t eat granny’ up on the white board and asked her class to place a comma in it. Magnus informed his teacher that ‘Don’t Eat Granny’ was his granny’s book. She was surprised, and I expect a little bemused!  She wouldn’t have known this title, as the book had not yet been published.

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Many thanks to Gillian for introducing Don’t Eat Granny to us.  You can click here to read some reviews from teachers or here to watch an interview between Gillian and NAPE.

If you would like to order copies for your classrooms, please use the button to the left.