Live Dragonology Course – Play-Based Learning For Children Who Love Dragons

Session Structure

This Dragonology Course is held once a week, for five (5) weeks. Each of these sessions lasts 40 minutes and has two parts:

➡ An interactive story time focused on developing vocabulary, background knowledge and concepts.

➡A hands-on, open-ended activity that can be engaged with in a variety of ways.

This Dragonology course is structured to provide children with high levels of learning autonomy. In other words, this course does not use “pre-selected” topics or themes. Instead, each week we introduce a ‘big idea’. Our story-telling provides an opportunity for young children to both develop some vocabulary to engage with that idea, and to begin exploring what that idea means to them – and to others.

Following each session, addition extension activities are provided to continue learning and exploring between each weekly session.

Week 1: Not All Dragons Are The Same.

➡ Big idea: Diversity.

➡ Exploration: Multimedia art.

Week 2: The Chemistry and Colour of Dragon Eggs.

➡ Big idea: What makes something beautiful or special?

➡ Exploration: Making dragon eggs.

Week 3: Fire Breathing.

➡ Big idea: Caring for others through problem-solving.

➡ Exploration: Fire-breathing art.

Week 4: Flight of the Dragon.

➡ Big idea: Courage

➡ Exploration: Creating dragons that fly.

Week 5: Dragon Homes.

➡ Big idea: Facts or fantasy?

➡ Exploration: Dragon home sculptures and constructions.

This fee for the full five sessions is US-$105. This fee does not include materials, which will need to be purchased individually.

Learning Outcomes

The intended learning outcomes for this course are from the ACECQA-approved Early Years Learning Framework. These learning outcomes explicitly reflect the needs of young children (0 – 8 years old) with diverse learning styles and cognitive needs at various stages of their development.

This class provides opportunities for children to:

• Use skills in exploring, inferring, predicting and hypothesising in order to develop their understanding of the environment, and their relationship to it.
• Combine fine-motor skills, cognitive skills, and thinking strategies in order to achieve increasingly complex patterns of activity to create, communication, solve problems and adapt.
• Manipulate objects and resources in order to investigate, take apart, assemble, invent, construct and experiment with cause-effect relationships.
• Make predictions and generalisations about different concepts, also communicating these using language, gestures, numbers, marks, text and/ or symbols.
• Use language, gestures or visual symbols in order to communicate and convey meaning about social and personal experiences, mathematical ideas, and scientific concepts .

Because this course is live, hands-on and online, parents will need to provide the required materials for each session.

The supplies required for each session will vary (not every item will be needed for every week). A list will be sent after each class, for the specific materials needed in the following week.

The following supplies will be needed over the five week program:

• sheets of paper (A4 or larger size).
• thick paper (e.g. watercolour paper or cardstock).
• colourful paper scraps (e.g. candy wrappers, foil, brochures, wrapping paper, crepe paper, old cards, etc).
• loose items from around your house (e.g. fabric scraps, bits of old wool or yarn, ribbon, buttons, sparkles, sequins).
• black sharpie, marker or texta.
• colour markers or crayons.
• white pvc/ pva/ school or Elmers glue.
• child-safe scissors.
• egg shells (a vegan option can be provided on request).
• vegetable oil.
• paper straws.
• a kitchen sponge.
• a roll of aluminium foil.
• either some air dry clay OR a batch of salt dough (a recipe will be provided).
• some acrylic paints.
• paint brushes.
• any items collected from your nature walks (e.g. sticks, leaves, moss, acorns/ pods, pinecones, pebbles, bark, feathers, etc).