Little Red Riding Hood!
It's the Big Bad Wolf vs. Little Red Riding Hood! Who will win the day?!
“Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.”
—Alfred Hitchcock
Working on this guide, I was surprised that Little Red Riding Hood is a lot darker than I remembered. I was also reminded that lots of kids love this sort of thing, mine included. Don’t worry though, even if your children are more sensitive to dark or scary stories, there’s plenty in this guide for you to enjoy together.
What you’ll find in the Little Red Riding Hood Guide:
5 Classic Red Riding Hood Books and 8 New or Alternative Versions
Snack Time: Blueberry Muffins for Grandma
Invitation to Play: Make a Map Through the Woods
Plus songs, poems, games, and more ways to play. Download the guide to get all the goods!
Guides are available to all subscribers for 1 month after they come out, and then they’ll go into the archive which is available to paid subscribers.
13 Little Red Riding Hood books to read with your kids.
As I said, some of these stories are really dark. Fairy tales usually are, and I think we often underestimate what kids can handle, but you should read through these first to see if they’d be a good fit for your family. (I still can’t decide how I feel about Beatrix Potter’s version - does the ending ruin it for me? I just love the delightful prose and illustrations so much!) There’s enough here that you should be able to find a handful to enjoy, and some of them are downright hilarious.
Little Red Riding Hood by Lari Don, illustrated by Célia Chauffrey
Red Riding Hood by James Marshall
Red Riding Hood by Beatrix Potter, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury
Red Riding Hood by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, illustrated by Edward Gorey
Little Red Riding Hood by Trina Schart Hyman
Pretty Salma: A Little Red Riding Hood Story from Africa by Niki Daly
Gina Kaminski Saves the Wolf by Craig Barr-Green, illustrated by Francis Martin
The Cat, the Dog, Little Red, the Exploding Eggs, the Wolf, and Grandma by Diane and Christyan Fox
Little Red Hot by Eric A. Kimmel, illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith
Little Red by Lynn Roberts, illustrated by David Roberts
Little Red and the Very Hungry Lion by Alex T. Smith
Little Red by Bethan Woollvin
Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China by Ed Young
I’m linking books to Amazon so you can read the description and reviews, but honestly, I almost never buy new books - AbeBooks, Thriftbooks, and eBay are great places to find gently used copies for cheap, and your local library is a magical place where you can borrow books FOR FREE. And if you must buy a new book, consider Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers.
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Red Riding Hood videos to watch with your kids.
🌲 Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre: Little Red Riding Hood (YouTube, 1 hour)
🧺 Little Red Riding Hood’s Goody Basket (Sesame Street, 4 minutes)
🌲 James Marshall’s Red Riding Hood (YouTube, 9 minutes)
🐺 Hear the Wild: Wolf Pack Howling in the Forest (European Wildlife by Lukáš Pich, 2 minutes)
Spark some wonder.
It’s probably the English major in me, but I think Red Riding Hood is my favorite fairy tale - I love all of the different takes on it, from heinous true crime story to clever heroism to forgiveness and redemption. There are just so many possibilities! Even if you don’t geek out about this stuff like I do, I think you’ll find these links interesting - maybe you’ll geek out just a little.
➵ Look: Daily Art Moment: Warja Honegger-Lavater (Portland Art Museum) “Can you tell an entire story using only colored dots?”
➵ Read: Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been? (by Joyce Carol Oates) This one is a throwback to my senior year English class on short stories. It’s a super creepy dark story that has so many parallels with the original Red Riding Hood - if you like the discomfort of the short story form, then you might love it. If you prefer happy endings, maybe skip this one.
➵ Watch: Wolves: Can’t Live With ‘Em, Can’t Live Without ‘Em (The Atlantic on YouTube, 4 minutes) “Humans don’t have a great track record of coexisting with top predators, and wolves are no exception. By the early 1900s, wolves were nearly extinct in all of Western Europe…While the animals’ population numbers dwindled, humans got used to life without them—despite the fact that their status as top predators meant that they had a positive impact on the ecosystem.”
➵ Read: Liberty and Red Riding Hood (Hazel Terry) This entire blog is devoted to the story of Red Riding Hood - the symbolism, history, and inspired art and retellings. I loved her thinking about the red Phrygian liberty cap and imagining Red Riding Hood as “a ubiquitous figure of good against evil, innocence against corruption.”
➵ Listen: Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf (The Children’s Poetry Archive, 4 minutes) Listen to Roald Dahl read his horrid and hilarious version of the story from his collection of Revolting Rhymes.
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”
—G.K. Chesteron, Tremendous Trifles (1909)
I hope you loved the Little Red Riding Hood guide! If you enjoyed it, you might also like this one from the archive:
Goldilocks and the Three Bears!
There's something so fun about reading new or mixed-up versions of a story that you know well, and kids really get a kick out of it. Tell them the story of Goldilocks that everyone knows, have them tell it to you, and then check out some of the "fractured" retellings together. You'll find lots of suggestions for playing around with this well-known tale in next week's guide.
And for the full archive of Discovery & Play Guides, click this green button here:
Kiss and hug, ladybug!
Love, Kathryn
So awesome! My personal fave may be Little Red Hot.