She gets a little irritated when she sees that even the beds are huge and couldn’t possibly be for bears. All the chairs were far too tall for her, and she decides to rest in the bedroom. She smells chocolate pudding, which is much more appealing than porridge, no? After gorging on pudding, she needs to have a seat. Yet…Įverything she sees in the house is scaled HUGE (you know, they’re dinosaurs), but naive Goldilocks pays no mind to that being out of the ordinary. Or a squirrel.” She’s a girl on a mission, and she thinks she’s going to the three bears’ house like the story is supposed to go. The dinosaurs were “definitely not hiding in the woods waiting for an unsuspecting kid to come by.” The “poorly supervised” Goldilocks thinks she hears the dinosaurs yelling at one another regarding her demise, “but that could have been a rock falling. Cue the giggles! Willems tells the story with playful irony. Where’s the baby in this version of the tale? He’s been replaced by the very random “some other dinosaur” who is visiting from Norway.

Instead of meeting a bear family, we meet a mother and father dinosaur. Check! Before you open the book, they’re already curious and giggling. Check! Another great way to capture kids’ interest is to feature dinosaurs.

A great way to capture kids’ interest is to make them laugh by reading the title, alone.

The title clues you in that this will be a re-telling of the classic fairy tale. When I discovered Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, I was psyched to see yet another dinosaur-related book from Willems. Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct is a top 10 read aloud in our household. Many people love author/illustrator Mo Willems for the wit and humor in his fun Pigeon books or the sentimental Knuffle Bunny, but our family most enjoys his lesser-known titles.

Goldilocks dinosaurs