School-Age: Dragon Lore

Last week our topic was dragon lore! It was a huge hit with the kids (and a big bump in attendance numbers) so I may have to try other types of mythological creatures at future program sessions!


1. Reading
Our book about dragons was "The Truth About Dragons" by Thomas Kingsley Troupe. It had the perfect amount of information and fun facts to keep the kids interested without being an overwhelming read-aloud for a nonfiction book.

2. Discussion
We talked about different types of dragons. I shared pictures and information about actual species that have been named 'dragons', such as the Chinese Water Dragon or the Leafy Sea Dragon. 

We played a trivia about dragon facts - to test their knowledge about whether they had listened during the book read-aloud. 

And we also had a name-the-dragon trivia of a variety of literary dragons. There are so many dragons in children's novels! There's Toothless from "How to Train Your Dragon", Danny Dragonbreath from Ursula Vernon's series Dragonbreath, Firedrake from Cornelia Funke's Dragonrider series, or Elliot from "Pete's Dragon". The list goes on and on. 

Some of the dragons they had never heard of, however, which made it a perfect opportunity to book talk some awesome series about dragons that they may like!

3. Craft
I found a neat craft on Pinterest to make dragon eggs that was originally on the blog Adventure in a Box. 

We used Crayola Model Magic air-dry clay:

One tub goes a long way. We ended up only using one tub and we had 30 or 40 kids make dragon eggs this week. I still have some leftover clay from the one tub, and a second tub that we got just in case. So we will have plenty of air-dry clay if we do a similar program in the future.

What I did like about the tub was that it had 4 different colors of pastel clay to choose from - blue, purple, yellow, and pink. So kids could choose different colored eggs if they would like.

I had the kids make the eggs similarly to how the Adventure in a Box blog did. We used aluminum foil to keep the shape of an egg so that once they started pressing gems into the clay, the eggs would not be super lumpy and odd-shaped.

We started out with an egg-shaped piece of crumpled up aluminum foil and a ball of clay that was similarly sized:

You cover the aluminum foil with the clay:

Then you decorate your dragon eggs with gems:

Notes:

As I mentioned above, this program was hugely popular! Dragons were a big hit and the kids loved taking home their own dragon eggs that they made at the library.