Saint George and the Dragon

Set "in the days when monsters and giants and fairy folk lived in England," this retelling of a classic and well-loved tale recounts the battle between Saint George and the Dragon - a creature so huge and fearsome that his tail "swept the land behind him for almost half a mile," and whose "deep jaws gaped wide, showing three rows of iron teeth ready to devour his prey."

C and I snuggled up on the couch and read this book.  Each and every page is filled with beautiful language and illustrations.  Honestly, I could not decide whether the words or the pictures were more beautiful.  The alliteration alone was enough to hold my interest, and the illustrations seemed to grasp C's imagination and send it flying in many directions.  Several times, I found him in his room "reading" this book and creating different stories based on the illustrations. 

While this book may be too dense for many young children (the Amazon age recommendation is 9-12), C loves long books and I love the opportunity to introduce him to unfamiliar words.  He also loves long books because he is an intense snuggler.  I often wonder if his love of books is mostly due to the snuggle factor.  From the earliest age, he was content to listen to me read.  I could read him the newspaper and he would curl up as tight and close as possible and just listen to the sound of my voice.  R loves books, but she has rules - they have to interest her and they cannot be too long.  I think this is probably the way most children are because T was the same way as a young child.

I recently saw a cool dragon bookmark on Almost Unschoolers.  C loves dragons and really wanted to make something dragon related after reading this book.  The bookmark was a science experiment from the book Super Science Concoctions by Jill Frankel Hauser.  I let C do this entire experiment without any help; I just supervised and tried to keep my mouth shut.  I didn't even tell him to try to put the dot closer to the dragon's mouth.  Anyway, here is the experiment:

Use colored pencils to draw the head of a dragon rising from the bottom edge of a strip of construction paper.  Put a dot of mixed food colorings in the dragon's open mouth.  Set the strip in a jar filled with about a half inch of water.  Watch as the dragon's fiery breath appears.  This is another color separation experiment.

C thinks it looks like the dragon spit out a fireball.  I like the way the colors separated.  We are going to laminate the bookmark to make it sturdier and useful!

Visit A Mommy's Adventures for more great books and book related projects.