Book #14: Day of the Dragon King

Jack and Annie travel to ancient China to rescue a book from the Dragon King himself!

For the fourteenth book of the Magic Tree House series, after talking about some of the things we liked (the tomb!) and some of the things we didn't like (the book burning!) about the book, we changed things up a bit by playing a game before doing trivia.

Prior to the meeting, I cut out of red construction paper the words of the first twenty titles of the Magic Tree House series. Then I did the same thing with blue construction paper. The red team and the blue team each had the task of assembling the correct titles from the words and, hopefully, getting the twenty titles in the proper order. (As they are here.) Both teams did a stellar job and received prizes in the form of candy.

Next, of course, we did book-related trivia. The questions and answers can be found here!

Finally, we made a craft devised by your very own librarian, Miss Amanda. I am referring to this craft as the Chopstick Dragon Mobile and the instructions for creating it are as follows:

Materials

Several colors of construction paper (you choose the colors)
Scissors
Chopsticks
Googly eyes
String
A single-hole punch
Glue
Markers

Steps

1. Pick a color and cut your dragon out of construction paper in a spiraly shape. Such as this. Be sure to begin narrowly at one end for the tail and end wide and rounded at the other end for the head. You can also cut a wedge shape out of the head to represent the mouth.
2. Make some dragon feet and dragon tongues from construction paper in your choice of colors. I simply cut forked tongues such as you would for a snake and created feet using the shape from an online picture of a dragon as an example.
3. Attach the feet and the tongue and add some googly eyes. You can create spikes or wings from construction paper and glue them on or draw on scales with markers. That's the great thing about dragons...they can look however you want them to look.
4. Use the hole punch and punch one hole at the top (presumably the head) of your dragon.
5. Tie a piece of string through the hole.
6. Tie the other end of the string to the chopstick.
7. Voila! A spiraly dragon mobile that looks really cool when you hang it. :) (It's like this , except it's a dragon.)

I completed steps 1 and 2 prior to the program, putting one dragon body, four feet, one tongue and one chopstick in a paper bag for each child. They assembled and decorated their dragons, cutting their own spikes or drawing their own scales if they wished. Finally, I punched the holes and tied the mobiles for them.

Join us on Wednesday, February 11, for the next Magic Tree House Book Club, featuring book #15, Viking Ships at Sunrise. Don't forget to register!