Autumn 2 2021
Dragon Designs
Autumn 2 2021
DT, English and PSHE
Thinking and Interdependence
Rationale: After sharing the story of “The dragon and the Nibblesome Knight”, the children are inspired to help design and build a new castle for the dragons to live in. They will start by investigating what features castles have and what they are used for. Labelled diagrams will help to show their findings. The children will focus on the message in the story about friendship and write their own version of the story. Making a fabric toy dragon which the children can take home, will help them to recognise the needs of a dragon. They will use this experience and the facts they have found out about castles, to prepare a plan and design in small groups. They will test different ideas, make mock ups and choose which tools and materials are best to use. The children will write instructions, descriptions and explanations to accompany their designs. The project will culminate in a castle presentation for Year R where the children look at how the features work and match the dragon.
Hook: The children arrive in the classroom to discover a small castle tent, a dragon, a selection of small dragons and a book (The Dragon and the Nibblesome Knight). The last page of the book has a very special message just for Year 1/2! The children will share the book and discover the story of how the knight and the dragon become friends, so much so that the knight decides that the dragon needs a castle like his to live in. The children are set the task of building a castle for the dragon which has working parts and provides the dragon with a safe place to live.
Labelling castles - we looked at all the different parts of the castle and then had a go at drawing and labelling our own!
The Dragon and the Nibblsome Knight - before starting to write our own version of the story, we ordered pictures from the beginning, middle and end of the book.
Story Maps - next we used a castle outline to help us create a story map showing the beginning, middle and end of our story. We are now ready to write!!
Dragon making - today we started making our very own dragons! We are going to be bringing these home soon so we can find out what a dragon needs before we start designing a castle for them!
We learnt how to do the running stitch to join our dragons together... it was tricky and we had to be very careful with the needles! We learnt all about how to be safe with the tools we were using, how to be accurate with our sewing and most importantly patience and determination!
Next we chose the decorations for our dragon's wings. We had to carefully stick the sequins and shiny paper onto the felt. We tried very hard to apply our learning of symmetry too!
Our finished dragons ready to take home to look after for our home learning. Mrs Hagan and Mrs Smith can't wait to see our finished scrapbooks to see what we have got up to!
We had a go at choosing our own adjectives to describe our own dragon - they have lots of different personalities, just like us! We thought about how they would all be friends and how their differences would make the Castle School very interesting as everyone would bring something unique and different!
Describing our dragons!
Working as a group to design our castles. We had to create a design brief to show what our castle MUST be and what it should include:
Before creating our castles, we investigated how we could make a drawbridge! We chose our materials (mega blocks rather than lego as it is larger), masking tape rather than blu tack etc. and began to create our structures!
We wrote what we had done to make the drawbridge!
Investigating different ways of cutting, joining and sticking cardboard
Making and painting our castles!
Our finished castles
When Reception came to see our castles and dragons!
