The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear

The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear is another great story by Don and Audrey Wood, a great author and illustrator team. This is one of those books young children fall in love with and request to be read over and over and over again. It has been fun watching my two children evolve from the oldest one loving this book as a toddler, to now being able reading it to her young brother.

The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear is written from a unique perspective, in that the reader is the one questioning and telling the mouse about the big, hungry Bear. The little Mouse has found a delicious strawberry, but he worries about the Big, Hungry Bear who "loves red, ripe strawberries." The Mouse's expressions in the illustrations are easily accessible to children. They can recognize the Mouse's feelings on each page of the book and connect it to their own experiences. Both of my children have obsessed over talking about the illustration in which the Mouse and strawberry are sitting at a table, drinking tea, and wearing fake glasses with a nose and mustache attached. My friends' child loved the picture of the Mouse guarding the strawberry wrapped in chains and padlocked. In the end, the Mouse ends up cutting the strawberry in two and sharing it with the reader.

The big, hungry Bear never makes an appearance in The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear , which makes one wonder....is there really a big, hungry Bear? Or, how likely it is the Bear would find this particular strawberry? Older children can contemplate such questions and relate it to their own fears and anxieties.

We like to play big, hungry Bear in our strawberry patch. We've read this book so many times, that we can recite the entire text while picking berries. My children laugh hysterically when we play this game, while enjoying our strawberry harvest.