The mouse overcomes his fears and goes to the lion for help. Can you think of a time when you have overcome your fears? How did you feel? What was the outcome? What advice would you give to others? Look at the facial expression of the animals in each illustration. Can you take photographs of yourself (or a friend) showing different facial expressions and use these as the starting point for your own illustrations? The mouse wants to be able to roar like a lion. Make a list of words that describe the sounds that different animals make. He pulls How to Roardown from his bookshelf ( “I will learn how to roar and I WILL learn it NOW!”). But to his dismay, Mouse discovers there’s only one beast who can teach him this skill: Lion!

Create your own illustrations of a lion and a mouse. Use our lion photos (see below) for inspiration. She runs a really long way every day and has done loads of ultra-marathons all over the world, the most recent of which include the Atlantic Coast Challenge (3 marathons in 3 days) and the Midnight Sun marathon in the Arctic Circle. She loves nothing more than getting all inky in the printmaking studio where she’ll often work super late, when there’s magic in the air. Play the Sneaky Mouse Game- the lion sleeps and the mouse tries to sneak up to them and tap their nose or put their nose on the lions nose without waking the lion. If the lion hears the mouse, they have to wake up and run way because Lion is scared of mice. So mouse has to catch the lion and cuddle them or say something nice so that the Lion knows not to be scared. Her written work includes children’s stories and poems, clever advertising copy and lots of other stuff besides. Her illustrative work is a smorgasboard of giant, hand-printed poems, mind-bogglingly detailed gouache illustrations and a cacophony of quirky prints and etchings.Mouse is desperate to be like lion but finds out that he doesn’t need to be like lion at all, he just needs to find his own voice and have self-belief. There are delightful messages on finding courage, being brave, taking risks (mouse faces the prospect of being lion’s dinner) and chasing your dreams. And also that friendship comes in the most unlikeliest forms. In the ‘tinyful house, lived the littlest, quietest, meekest brown mouse’. Can you think of other superlatives and use them in your own sentences? She once won a week-long date in Tahiti, with ‘Man of the Millenium’ featured in Marie Claire magazine (and then spent a long time living it down). She collects alphabets and hats and has a Nissan Figaro car which everyone says looks like a matchbox toy.

Find examples of rhyming words throughout the book and use them to create your own rhyming dictionary. The story tells us that ‘we all have a mouse AND a lion inside’. Can you think of any stories that have a moral? What do they try to teach us? The story is told in delightful rhyming prose and as expected, the artwork by Jim Field is delightful and full of warmth and charm.Rachel is a writer of words, drawer of pictures and champion of silver linings. She exhibits widely, writes tirelessly and frequently creates slightly unhinged characters.