Merlin and The Dragons
by Jane Yolen, Illustrated by Li Ming
I picked this book for my book talk because it had dragons in the title and on the cover and it was fantasy day. Once I started reading it though I loved it. The story is really hard to explain, but basically a little boy is having nightmares and so he goes to get advice from Merlin, and Merlin tells the little boy a story to explain to him that dreams are important.
The story goes like this:
A little boy is the son of a local princess, but he doesn't know who his father is and is teased because of that. And he becomes known as "devil boy" because he "predicts" the weather, when really he finds a book about the seasons and moon cycle. An evil king comes to the town and wants to build a tower but it keeps crashing down every night and he thinks it's the locals doing. The little boy has been having dreams about dragons and tells him to dig up the ground and that there will be 2 dragon eggs, to kill the dragons, and the ground will be fine. He does just that and there are 2 dragons- one white and one red.
The white one gets away. After that another army comes to destroy the king and his army and defeats him. The evil army's symbol is a red dragon and the good army's symbol is a white dragon.
The hero in the end of this story is a soldier who charged up the tower first to kill the evil king, and he only had 1 son.
I bet you can guess who the 1 son is...
The boy who this story is being told to. Turns out he is King.
I suggest you read the book, because it is much better than how I described it. I think this is a great book because it would capture boys and girls attention. It is all about the outcast coming and being very important, good triumphing over evil, and about believing in yourself. All things that I think need to be presented to children.
And the pictures are very colorful and descriptive. It is very text heavy, so I would suggest keeping this for the older grades to read to themselves or for you to read to them, but the younger kids will lose focus.
Above is a link to a lesson plan using this book for older kids (middle school).
That is awesome! I love that there is a picture book appropriate for mid schoolers! This book looks very cool and mystical. I love dragons too and any opportunity to use them in a classroom is totally awesome!
ReplyDeleteWow! Kelsey this book sounds amazing and the readwritethink link really allows for creativity to be involved in the creation of back stories. I would love to use this book to show several different aspects of writing and literary work. The text could be broken out of the book just to teach a certain aspect of fantasy. Thanks for the great ideas.
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