Prince, Princess, and a Dragon OH MY!

As a child, one of my favorite memories was pretending I was a damsel in distress. My childhood friend and I would climb, what at the time seemed to be, the tallest pine trees in the world. We dressed up in her sisters old prom dresses and played games, sang songs, and laughed for hours until it was time for me to head home for dinner. This is why the fairy tale unit is one of my favorites. Here are some of the activities we did this week to highlight Dragons.

Science-

We recently bought a new book for the classroom that the kids have been going bananas over called, Not Your Typical Dragon, by Dan Bar-el. In this story, Crispen the dragon has his seventh birthday. Seventh birthdays are especially important for dragons, because it is the time when all other dragons typically begin to breathe fire. Crispen however, finds out that he is not able to. Instead he can only conjure strange things like whipped cream, band-aids, and beach balls.

To parallel the experience of being a dragon, the children had a chance to pretend they were Crispen - by blowing bubbles. This activity can be beneficial in working the muscles in your child's cheeks, lips, and tongue to help create more muscle control and ultimately help with language development. 

Art-

The art area is where we learn to create with step by step instructions. This is the area is where  I let the children have materials and, at times, an example. By doing this, you get the best results, not to mention the children have more pride in the work they have created. This is especially true when you are not breathing over their shoulder constantly. This activity was very cute, but some of the activity was a little too difficult for the children to preform on their own. I do recommend this activity for children that are a little older and have more manual dexterity then your typical three-year-old. All you need is green paint and paper, toilet paper tubes, and tissue paper. 

Each child should paint their tube green, giving it time to dry before you finish the rest of the project. We seemed to have a lot of trouble getting the eyes to stay on without it needing to stand on end.

For younger children you may want to pre-cut half circles before beginning the project. Start by gluing googly eyes onto the half circle. We placed glue at the bottom of each half circle, and let them dry. This is the part of project frustrated us the most, because we did not leave time for the tube to dry nor did we expect the eyes to keep sliding off the tube. If you have have any better suggestions on how to attach the eyes without them sliding down the sides please leave it in the comments.

Once the eyes are dry you can have the children glue the tissue paper on the inside of the tube, and play the drying (waiting) game once more. Once it is finished you can begin breathing fire like a real dragon!

Gross-motor-

It was a very rainy day so we had to make due inside. The children pretended they were in knight school, practicing the art of slaying dragons. Each child was given a sword (just a simple straw) and had to use their hand-eye coordination to try and pop the bubbles the dragon was blowing. This activity got the kids up and moving, laughing and giggling.


I hope you enjoyed taking a look into our classroom and what we enjoyed today!