Depois de ouvirmos o hino de Inglaterra, criarmos uma bandeira de Inglaterra gigante que nos fez compreender o significado de cada cor e cada linha, ouvimos finalmente a corajosa história de S. Jorge e a sua luta com o dragão. A dúvida surgiu então…existem dragões verdadeiros?
Da lenda do Dragão de S. Jorge, em Inglaterra, o grupo dos “Preeschoolers” voou nas suas asas até à China e, foi assim que aconteceu …contado pela nossa assistente Comenius Marijke…
I would like to tell you something about my experiences in school last week: what did we do about the theme ‘dragons?’
I told the kids a story about a dragon. I described the dragon and while I was reading this description, kids were drawing the dragon like I described it. Some of the kids couldn’t understand all the words, so we translated to Portuguese. The story went like this:
Once upon a time, there was a big dragon. This big dragon had twelve scales on his back and three on his head. The dragon had one big eye and one small eye. He also had a wart on his nose. The dragon ate too much, that’s because he had a big belly! And you could see his big toes. The mouth of the dragon was open en you could see his tongue. The dragon was sleeping under an appletree, while the babydragon was playing with his ball. It was the first time that kids were doing this activity. In other words, it didn’t go so smoothly. Kids began to draw spontaneous a dragon before I gave them the first description of the dragon. I explained the instructions again and after that second time, kids understood what they had to do. They tried to follow my description as accurately as possible. At the end of the activity I asked everyone around the mat to sit. We looked at all the dragons and came to the conclusion that every child, in spite of the same description, had a very different dragon signed. Why is this? The children decided that everyone draws at another way and that’s ok.
The kids learnt something about the typical Chinese dragons. Through a powerpoint I explained to them where China is in the world, what their flag looks like, why Chinese dragons are so important to China. After showing some Chinese dragons, I talked with the children how we could make our dragon. The children worked together. They painted the cardboard red, cutted the cardboard eyes of the dragon and made colorful viewers. Afterwards they made braids for the hair of the dragon. This was the hair of the dragon. At the end of the day I asked the children if they still knew how the Chinese flag looks like. And yes. Red with yellow. ‘And what was so special about this flag? Is there a flower drawn on the flag?’ ‘No, stars!” We made the Chinese flag and stuck it on the head of the dragon. Afterwards we had a dragon show. All children under the canvas and go!
It was a lovely week!
Marijke Spaepen
Making the braids for the hair of the dragon. Scary enough? Like a real Chinese dragon. We just wanna have fun!