The Dragon Machine

Product Information

This is a three-week Writing Root using the text The Dragon Machine by Helen Ward, in which children are initially engaged by noticing a dragon tail and then going on a dragon hunt across the school. Helen Ward’s text is gentle, magical and empathetic, while the soft, dreamy tones and rich shapes and hazy considerations of Wayne Andersons’ pictures are suggestive and glorious. I also think young children will enjoy looking for the dragons on each page as they follow George around and cause trouble for him. This book is a little disturbing in that it takes his parents a while for them to notice that he is gone. Using Monster Poems and Dinosaur Poems by Korky Paul and John Foster children will enjoy identifying, reading and writing questions, statements, exclamations and commands.

I'd recommend it for ages 3 and up as the muted colors don't hold an infant's attention well and some ability to connect words with pictures will help them enjoy the book more. The pack even goes a step further by offering a selection of resources and activities at the end of the pack to support teachers in the classroom. One class used this book to compare and contrast illustrations that make a book seem serious (this book) with illustrations that make a book seem funny (The Library Dragon). Yesterday a parent came over to tell me how impressed she was by the book fair and that you did a fabulous job of selling the books to the children first.

Use this Dragon scene Colourful Semantics activities to support the learners construct sentences using colour coded text parts in line with the Colourful Semantics framework. This was most horrible when it happened at church, because Evan would not pay attention to the preacher and would get into trouble. The perfect introduction to the legendary world of dragons, The Dragon Machine uses a clever mix of text and illustrations to describe how George, a young, overlooked boy, becomes aware of dragons hiding all around him.

This book is paced very quickly and there are few elements to distinguish it as an international book, but the illustrations and typeface seem to fit this book perfectly. It was such a pleasure to meet you both, and I really appreciated how smoothly and professionally you ran everything. George befriends the dragons, but soon, they become more than he can handle, and George must handle it on his own. We got it originally from the library a number of times before we decided to look for a secondhand copy online.

The Dragon Machine is reminiscent of Where the Wild Thing Are in the way that George feels ignored and unnoticed so he finds friendship with dragons and escapes in a dragon machine to "a great wilderness, ignored and overlooked. They include purposeful writing suggestions, links to the wider curriculum so that texts can be used across other subjects, key questions as well as spelling or phonics investigations.

The little boy is not really noticeable and at the end he is very noticeable, but there is nothing in any other part of the book that talks about his difficulty being noticed and how it has hindered or frustrated his life. This text could lead to further investigations of dragons, using the book Dragonology which also uses the talents of Helen Ward and Wayne Anderson amongst others – both are multi-award-winning. Not only have the children have been building sentences with full stop and capital letter screwdrivers, they have been using an adjectives paintbrush to describe nouns and make their writing even better! He made up little men, kinda the size of the Brownies (picture here played by Kevin Pollack and Rick Overton) from the movie Willow. I was at my last school for 4 years and we had ********* book fairs every term – and every term, I was disappointed by the narrow range of books.A lovely story with illustrations that lift it out of the ordinary, I'm very happy to add it to my ever growing collection of dragon books! Evan wrote down what they did, laughed at their jokes and was upset when one of them was hurt or died (as the plot required). George is the only one who can see the overlooked and ignored dragons that twine around the ankles and sewer grates around him.