vasily and the dragon

Deep down in the dark

The dragon dwells.

Dare to ask

And he will tell.

-from "Vasily and the Dragon", a Russian Fairy Tale (modified by Enki Education)

Our story for the first half of the week was the Russian Fairy Tale, "Vasily and the Dragon". Given the kids' difficulty in recalling this one, the content may have been a bit beyond them. For instance, the ferryman has Vasily ask the dragon who his replacement will be, and the dragon says "whoever touches the oar". Later, Vasily's evil adopted father, Marko, grabs the oar to try and knock Vasily overboard, and it fuses to his hands and his feet fuse to the ferry. Yet the kids didn't understand that Marko had then become the new ferryman. There were other situations in the story that the kids didn't "get" either. I am going to mark this story to use again next year -- my guess is another year's maturity will help with understanding some of the subtleties of this and other more complicated Fairy Tales.

(Note in this drawing that J added a "ha, ha!" after Vasily's name, because he thought it was funny that "Vasily" has a "Silly" in it.)

Zoo Boy's drawing. The consonant hidden in the story is, as I'm sure you've long since guessed, "D". J actually didn't see it, but Zoo Boy identified it right off the bat. The Boy also readily wrote out the title, so perhaps the writing strike is over? In any case, he did ask for quite a bit of help in setting up this drawing, but took it over himself once we got the basic shape of the body, adding the head, feet, scales, and funky orange tail himself.

J's letters on top, Zoo Boy's beneath. I found it interesting that J corrected his D to be more uniform. I didn't comment. We're going to work on perfecting letter formation next year, this year I just want the kids to get comfortable using the writing implements, and feeling free to do things with their own "flair". They both need to build stamina with the writing tools before they can be expected to get more exacting with their letter formation, etc.




J happily wrote out the entire verse (which was nice and short). From this point on, the story verses are going to be getting longer. It will be interesting to see how much he chooses to (and is able to) write from them. Again, that's another thing we'll work on (with J) next year (completing the verses). This year his only direction is "write as much or as little of the verse as you would like". He usually chooses to write the entire verse, but I'm not sure that will last with the longer verses. Zoo Boy is still not writing any of the verse -- next year I'll expect him to write at least the first few words, as he is quite obviously capable of that (given that he IS writing the titles on our drawings most of the time). For this year, since he's still techinically not old enough for first grade, I am comfortable letting him do whatever he wants with the work, free from my criticism.

My drawing. This was one of those instances where I liked the kids' drawings much better than my own. J's dragon head LOOKS like a dragon's head -- very fierce with nasty, sharp teeth. Mine looks kind of like Barney -- pretty harmless and cartoony. Even Zoo Boy's dragon looks more ferocious than mine. Ah well, let's face it, I'm more of a flowers and bunnies type of artist anyway....