"Daddy, how do you spell 'steam train'?" "The way it sounds." "Choo-choo-choo?" Originally found at Language Log (click to read another phonics joke)

Choosing books to read with the kids has been a treat and a challenge for me; I’m learning that books that work really well read aloud to a class of 30 5 and 6 year olds are not necessarily the same ones that work well with one quiet child in my lap!

I love getting the chance to put on my silliest voices and I always try to add to the experience by bringing in a prop or two to help transport us all into the magic of the story. So, for Mini Grey’s Traction Man stories I borrowed a (Tr)action Man and bought in a scrubbing brush whilst after reading Max’s Words, I gave each child a word (cut from a newspaper or magazine) from my own lexical collection.

One of the kids’ very favourite books last term was Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie on the Road by Joel Stewart, which I read accompanied by 30 very happy kids blowing away on party tooters (blowouts). The teachers hid, I lost my voice, the kids were in seventh heaven!

Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie on the Road makes me giggle every time I read it. It contains acutely recognisable observations about how kids can adore making noise, how they can be fearless, enthusiastic and full of beans. It is illustrated with romance and beauty and charm. It’s brilliant for reading aloud because there are lots of opportunities to use the full range (!) of your vocal abilities. And quite aside from the hilarious story and gentle and gorgeous illustrations, it’s really engaging for early readers to read themselves with a fun format borrowing some characteristics of comic strips.

Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie (who first hooked up with each other in an earlier Joel Stewart picture book) are having enormous fun hooting. Then, in an episode which may or may not be autobiographical (Joel Stewart is a big folk music fan, playing several instruments himself including two types of pipes; these and these), Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie make such a racket they get thrown out of town.

With their banishment, their adventures really begin! A charming prince, a slumbering princess, a quest to slay a frightful dragon and the creation of a wandering band of tap-dancing minstrels led by the hooting, tooting Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie all play their part in creating a modern, magical fairy tale that avoids all sense of the saccharine whilst being genuinely enchanting.

The peripatetic players charm their way from one end of the kingdom to the other but then trouble strikes: it seems they are simply unable to stop hooting, tapping, singing and dancing. What magic will still them? Who will save the day? Will quiet ever return to the kingdom?

Quite simply Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie on the Road is brilliant. And despite the groans I know will ensue, I can’t resist promising you will have an absolute hoot sharing this with kids young and old alike.

When I read Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie on the Road at home, M and J wanted to make their own hooters. Inspired by this, this and this video on YouTube we set about making our own satisfyingly loud and fruity sounding hooters.

We used:

We cut the dome off the balloon and stretched it over the smaller end of the yoghurt pot, fixing it in place with tape. We also made a small blow-hole with the scissors near the balloon covered end of the pot.

Next we cut off the plastic bottle’s bottom and pushed the top half of the bottle inside our balloon-covered pot. When doing this there are two key things to remember: (1) the top of the bottle must touch and slightly stretch the balloon (2) the bottle must have a diameter only slightly smaller than the yoghurt pot.

The next task was to make an airtight seal where the bottle meets the sides of the yoghurt pot – just use plenty of tape to join the two together.

Now it’s already to blow!

I wish my photos could capture how this construction makes a really, really satisfying foghorn type of noise! The kids adore it, and even I’m pretty pleased with how we were able to make such a substantial hooter from such simple household objects. My only concern is what the neighbours think…

Whilst making our tooters we listened to:

Other activities which could go well with Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie on the Road include:

So far it would seem that books that are noisy, interactive, wacky and occasionally a little bit naughty go down the best reading to a whole class. If you’ve read to classes, what books have you found work particularly well with 5/6/7 year olds?

Disclosure: I received Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie on the Road gratis from the publisher. This review, however, reflects my own and honest opinion.

Photo: Wili Hybrid

Although I’ve started honing my book searching skills and am beginning to build up a good repertoire of techniques for finding great books for the girls, there’s nothing I love more than when a wonderful book arrives in my lap out of the blue. Tell me a dragon by Jackie Morris isn’t a book I’d heard of and I certainly wasn’t on the look out for a dragon-themed book, but when I saw Tell me a dragon on the library shelf I knew it was one that was destined to become a new family favourite.

Tell me a dragon isn’t a story book, but rather a compendium of imagined dragons. Each double page spread is filled with a pre-raphaelite-esque portrait of a different dragon, accompanied by a line or two describing it. The first dragon we meet is

made from the sun and the stars.
Sparkled with stardust,
all night he follows the silver moon-path
across the sky.

Later we meet a sky dragon who rides “the secret music of the wind” and an ice dragon whose “breath is snowflakes.”

Some dragons in the book are bold and fierce, but none are menacing or frightening – instead this book reclaims them as majestic, magical and mythical creatures, dragons which will (almost literally) give your child’s imagination wings.

The format of this richly illustrated book reminds me of Castles by Colin Thompson (here’s my review) – both books open up the worlds of possibility and move away from widespread, caricatured disney-like images, to something much more creative, powerful and awe-inspiring. At the end of this book we’re invited to imagine what our own dragon might be like – and this was the perfect platform for M to fly off and create some dragons of her own. Here’s what we did.

1. We gathered together

2. For each dragon, M took 2 pieces of card. On one piece she draw a dragon head and on the other piece she draw a dragon tail. I cut out the heads and tails, leaving a little extra card where the dragon’s head and tail would attach to a body.

3. M made a body for each dragon by taking 2 long strips of paper each about 5 cm wide. She folded the paper strips over themselves – first one strip, then the next and so on, to create a sort of accordion effect. I sellotaped each end of the accordion body so that they didn’t unravel.

4. M decorated her dragon heads and tails with glue, glitter and shiny things. She also added googly eyes – always popular!

5. I attached the heads, bodies and tails to each other with sellotape, and than stuck on a craft stick at either end of the body, so that the girls could hold the dragons and make them move. (In this photo they’re stuck in egg cartons to keep them upright).

6. What the girls *loved* was dancing with their dragons to music!

The endpieces of Tell me a dragon are stunningly illustrated with hundreds of dragon eggs. This inspired me to create some for the girls to find one morning at breakfast…

I put the following in a saucepan:

Whilst heating all the ingredients up I kept stirring until everything was well mixed and some of the water had evaporated – perhaps a couple of minutes.

I then scooped out a handful of the mixture and moulded it around a small plastic dragon (well, actually a dinosaur as that’s what I had to hand, but we’ll pretend it was a dragon), to make an egg shape. I had enough mixture to make 5 eggs, each approximately the size of a duck egg.

I left the eggs to cool and harden over night. In fact I left them for two nights to make sure the eggs dried properly but I imagine I could have sped this up by putting them in a very cool oven for an hour or two.

I made a nest out of shiny paper and pipecleaners, filled it with the eggs, found a mother dragon to sit on the brood, and waited till the girls woke up.

Delighted, the girls cracked open the eggs to find baby dragons!

Tell me a dragon:

The dragons and the girls had great fun dancing to Dragon Breath by Keith Munslow, Puff the Magic Dragon (of course!) – our version is by Kevin Roth, and the catchy Dragon with a Flagon by Max Tell.

Other dragon-related activities we think would be fun include

Now, over to you! What’s your favourite dragon story?