Dragons

I was talking to my friend, Adrianne, one day and she mentioned that she tries to do a couple of themes with her kids over the summer. "Themes?" I asked, "What do you mean?" She said they pick a theme like pirates, or fairies, and they read books, make crafts and treats, and maybe watch a movie all related to their theme. I thought that sounded pretty fun, but a lot of work.  Adrianne is pretty amazing.  So last week was our first week out of school, and I took everybody to the library. On a whim, at the library I thought, maybe we'll try a theme. It ended up being Dragons.

We checked out "A Friend for Dragon" by Dav Pilkey, "There's NO Such Thing as a Dragon" by Jack Kent (this one was pretty cute,) and "The Knight and the Dragon" by Tomie dePaola (which we've read before, but it's always a favorite.)

I printed a bunch of dragon coloring pages off the internet and the kids colored them, cut them out and made stick puppets out of them. We also worked on making a homemade Dragon pinata. That was pretty adventuresome of me, I thought, since I really don't have a clue on how you make one. 

(To see the finished product, keep scrolling down.)  Once we'd made the pinata, we had to throw a party because that's what pinata's are for, right?

So the kids made dragon party invitations, and I told them they could each choose a family to invite to share the party.  (Since this was kind of spur of the moment, I wasn't sure exactly what we'd even do at a dragon party.) 

Well, the kids ended up taking the invitations to our ward's Park Day, and anybody who was at the park got an invitation.  Which is fine--just a little bigger than I'd originally thought.  So we had an amazing Dragon Party with over 20 kids here!  Thank goodness it was actually fun.

In case you're wondering, here's what you do at a Dragon party:

1. Make dragon masks

2. Do a "Dragon Warrior" Obstacle Course: Run with high knees through the rungs of a ladder laying down on the ground, throw a beanbag through the tire swing, jump over a wading pool filled with water, army crawl under a PVC pipe, and kung-fu kick a sleeping bag suspended from the upstairs balcony.  When the Obstacle Course is complete, you receive your Dragon scroll which tells you which team you're on for the Dragon skits.

3. Each team gets 5 minutes to come up with a Dragon skit, and then we watch them all.  They were GREAT!

4. We also did these dragon boat races in the wading pool.  We made "dragon" boats out of water bottles cut in half and each team had to blow theirs across the pool--first one across won. (I was improvising, okay?--honestly, I didn't find very many dragon party ideas on the internet.)  I didn't ask the kids what their favorite part was, but I suspect it was the pinata.

5. Break open the pinata.  Here it is.  Didn't look much like a Dragon--more like a crocodile with wings.  

Still, it held up for an entire round and a half before they finally got the candy out of it.

All in all, more successful than I thought it would be, and loads of fun.  

We're so glad we got to have so many friends share it with us! 

And I can't wait to do another theme . . . next summer.  :)