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. 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.

I really enjoy writing verse, even though it can be fiendishly difficult. I used to memorise poems as a child and it means a lot to me when parents tell me their child can recite one of my books.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? Look at the patterns and textures on the animals in the story. Investigate what camouflage means and how this helps animals. 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.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. 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.In the summer, you could also carry out a caterpillar and butterfly hunt and talk to children about their lifecycle. Look at the different types of punctuation shown in the story. Could you use some of these in your own writing? Investigate environmental issues linked to jungles and rainforests. How can people help to protect them? Look at the creatures in the story and the illustrations. Could you write a report about one of them, describing where they live and what they are like? 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.