My Father’s Dragon

One thing I am really enjoying about our homeschooling curriculum, Sonlight, is all of the books that we get to read together. The science and history ones from Usborne are awesome and the fictional read-aloud stories are wonderful too.

So far this year we have read The Boxcar Children and My Father’s Dragon. Both were new stories to Adrianna as well as to me. The only downside to enjoying these stories so much is that we cannot make ourselves stop at just one chapter a day per the recommended lesson plan. We loved My Father’s Dragon so much that we read it in two or three days and then immediately went to the library to check out its two sequels, Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland. I don’t know which I liked more – the story itself or the adorable illustrations. We quickly read through the sequels and Adrianna requested they be read again, from the beginning. This time, Greg is reading them aloud to her at bedtime so he can enjoy them too.

As a writing exercise, I bought a little composition book that has room for both a drawing and writing. My goal is to periodically have Adrianna draw a picture from a book and then write a couple sentences about the book.

Adrianna’s drawing shows one of the dragon’s sisters (because she wanted to make a pink one with spots), Elmer’s sister (even though he didn’t have a sister), the cat, Elmer and his knapsack, and the cave that the dragons were trapped in. Her journaling says, “My Father’s Dragon. One cold snowy day I went to save a dragon and I found tigers and he gave them chewing gum.” She asked me how to spell most of the words and then she did all the writing. I think she is doing a fantastic job.