My Father's Dragon

Have you heard of Elmer Elevator?  I first heard about him about 15 years ago.  I'll confess the character name did not inspire me.  However, I was quickly reminded of the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover." Or in this case by its main character name.

Turns out Elmer is a fantastically clever fellow with a very big heart who has a great adventure saving a baby dragon.  This 10 chapter book is the first in a trilogy and it's just plain old fun to read.  It lends itself to all types of fun activities. Like this torn paper version of the baby dragon.

You can easily integrate teaching map skills and landforms with this book.  One of the culminating activities we all loved had the students creating their own salt dough islands. Yes, it was messy and time consuming, but oh so fun! Kids love the opportunity to be creative and I will tell you that some of our islands were really quite impressive.

I supplied students with miscellaneous craft supplies (I always have odd bits of things left over from my many crafty experiments).  I also put a call out to my families to send in any leftover supplies they were willing to part with.  Each year we always ended up with a great assortment and the kids never ceased to amazing me with what they come up with.  As a part of the assessment students were required to include 3-5 landforms we covered in our study and label them. It was always fun to see what they chose to incorporate into their creations.

I can't say enough great things about this book and guess what?  It's now a part of the public domain.  Ruth Stiles Gannett wrote in in 1923! It's available for FREE along with the illustrations at gutenberg.org.   How great is that?   

I've got an entire unit of activities to go along with this classic story available on my TPT store be sure to check it out if you are interested in using this book with your class!

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Be sure to check out this My Father's Dragon Pinterest Board that includes some additional fun ideas that go nicely with the unit.