Homeschool Activities:

How To Draw A Dragon And Learn Dragonology

This is one of our great homeschool activities which spring from a delight in dragons and all the things you can do with them – including learning Dragonology and finding out how to draw them.

You'll find all sorts of homeschool activities for all ages:

• Write a story
• Collect treasure
• Make a dragon out of junk
• Learn how to draw a dragon
• See how to make a mobile
• Find out how to make a magical dragon lantern

If you subscribe to the Monthly Activities free newsletter, you'll be able to look at the back issues and read our Fantastic Dragons newsletter. You'll see we've found all sorts of homeschooling dragonology activities, from a flying dragon in glorious 3-D to making an origami dragon and trying out glass painting.

Dragonology For the Very Young

This project is inspired by Ernest Drake's Dragonology series, which gives a ready-made basis for all sorts of homeschool activities.

Just look at those taming spells, flying techniques and tracking signs – who says it's just children who know how to enjoy themselves!

William and Catherine have absolutely loved the Dragonology series and like all the best homeschooling activities this is theirs – I've just helped along the way. As they've grown older they've moved on to the Dragon Orb books and I think that's one of the strengths of this homeschool project.

You can learn how to draw dragons at any age!

If you have the Dragonology books you could show them all the lovely things inside and see if they want to learn the art of Dragonology. The great thing with homeschooling is you can follow where your child leads (sometimes literally!), but here are some suggestions for homeschool activities:

Collect Treasure

All dragons love treasure. Why don't you go round the house and collect some of Mom's? You could make your very own dragon hoard and put it in its own special homeschool treasure chest.

Catherine found some Frost Dragon skin on top of the record deck. The male Indian sail dragon is attracted to ear rings and the Asian silver dragon obviously likes a very cosy lair:

Make a dragon out of junk

This is one of those homeschool activities which is surprisingly easy to do at any age. You could invite a load of other children round of mixed ages (plus their parents) and get them stuck in to create a dragon with you. We had great fun using a shoebox for the head, gold material for the wings and coffee cups for the tail.

Other useful dragon body bits:

Cardboard boxes, different shapes and sizes; old material (sparkly red for flames, leathery for wings); plastic containers; corks (teeth); foam; muffin cases (scales). They're all great props to add to the fun of homeschooling activities.

Learn How to Draw Dragons

You could use a long wall paper backing strip, large brushes and paint the biggest dragon you can. Or you could draw a sparkly dragon out of the Dragonology book and add some glitter. Even more fun are Catherine's fantastic homeschool dragon coloring pages which you can download and use for free.

Write a Dragon Story

Homeschool activities like this one are ideal for practising writing skills! We've got lots of free story writing worksheets for you to try, including this Keeping Baby Dragons worksheet you can print out (just click on it and a pdf will open) and A Guide To Dragons for older children.

Homeschool Activities For Older Children

We used the Dragonology books as our guide to bring dragons back to life. If you've looked at the series you'll know dwarf dragons have a particular liking for jam sandwiches and basilisk dragons are fluent in English so there's plenty of opportunity for homeschool humor, activities and invention.

Make a Dragonology model

You can see how to make your own homeschooling dragon models in our page on Art Activities for Children. Based on the Dragonology books, Catherine's designed her own models out of card so you can learn how to draw dragon wings and tails and make them fit together to create flying model dragons perfect for making a homeschool mobile.

We've got lots more homeschool models you can try if dragons aren't your thing. How about learning how to make a robot out of junk with our creative homeschooling activities?

Catherine began by learning how to draw dragons, so here are her tips on:

How To Draw A Dragon

If you go to our page on How to Draw a Dragon, you can see a series of photos showing you stage-by-stage how to draw a dragon. Catherine shows you how to make drawing dragons easy but still get fabulous results.

You'll find some brilliant tips for drawing dragons, including adding a slant above the eye for a mischievous homeschool twinkle!

How to Draw Dragons

Firstly, the great thing about our homeschool activities is that you can't go wrong. You can't draw a dragon which someone else thinks doesn't look right. In fact, the more weird yours looks, the more likely it existed!

However, there are some rules which help:

1. Decide where your dragon comes from – does it live in the cold, icy, North or the green, lush, rainforest? You can see dragons from all over the world in the Dragonology books. Boyd's forest dragon comes from Australia's rainforest, though if you look at our Homeschool Science: Rainforest for Kids activities, you'll see it's really a type of lizard.
2. Choose whether your dragon is from the ancient, medieval past (as pictured in fairy tales), or purely from fantasy. You'll see lots of different species to draw in the Dragonology series. Does yours have an Oriental influence? Chinese dragons are considered particularly lucky.

   

3. What sort of key features will you pick out when you start thinking about how to draw dragons? Will yours be a gigantic, lumbering beast or a feather-light fire-breather? Catherine's Striped Sea dragon lives in the ocean and attacks submarines.
4. Think about the other features of the dragon you want to draw. Does it have wattles or a head-crest? Horns or claws? How are you going to draw the wings?



5. The key to learning how to draw a good dragon is to get it all hanging together in a way which makes some sort of sense. A good start is looking at How-to-Draw books of similar animals and, of course, checking out the Dragonology books. I can see many influences in Catherine's and William's drawings, particularly dinosaurs and lizards. Your dragon needs to look like something that might come alive and breathe fire – so it needs to be able to walk or fly. Catherine's Australian Goblin dragon has four heads and her Cat dragon has four legs – plenty of room for variety.
6. The most important feature in learning how to draw dragons is the head. If you can get the eye in the right place you’re well on the way to a convincing drawing. Dragons' eyes are often placed quite far back, sometimes as far as the ears/crest.
7. Use materials to enhance your drawing. Iridescent paper is great for shiny, vibrant scales; pipe cleaners make nice whiskers.
8. Mixing crayons and felt-tips often gives good coloration, but, since many dragons tend to be rather brash, gel pens add extra brilliance.

Homeschooling Dragonology

There's more to learning Dragonology than drawing. You need to look for signs around your homeschooling house that your dragon has left behind. Is there any shed skin? Holographic paper and sweet wrappings are often convincing signs.

You can sometimes discover a hoard of gemstone stickers or small, pretty, mineral stones (amethyst seems a favorite).

Feathers may have been shed from the wings, but the Trible dragon left human hair from its rider and we found a baby Cat dragon whisker in the plumes of a peacock feather. Of course, there are always opportunities to draw droppings and even vomit! As usual, the key to success with homeschool activities is to have fun.

I never really consciously set out to do so, but if you want to take on a teacher-perspective and look at homeschool activities, it's blindingly obvious that your child will be learning all sorts of things. Reading, writing, art and geography – you need to find out where dragons come from - will be among them. Then there’s homeschooling science – Dragonology is packed with real facts about habitats and animal behaviour as well as information on all sorts of subjects.

Homeschool Dragon Crafts

Once you've learnt how to draw dragons, you can use your homeschool Dragonology skills to make a magical dragon lantern, perfect for homeschooling art activities for kids.

You'll see in our page on homeschooling Dragon Crafts that you can use the fantastic dragons you've drawn for some extra special homeschool activities making dragon lanterns. That way you can enjoy dragons every night when you go to bed!

Best of all, I hope that learning dragonology and finding out how to draw dragons has shown you how dragons light up your homeschool activities!

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