Celebrate National Appreciate a Dragon Day

Saturday January 16 is a special holiday.

It is National Appreciate a Dragon Day. Wahoo!

Everybody, absolutely EVERYBODY, needs to celebrate this holiday.

Especially grandmothers and grandkids.

Bless the little pea pickin’ heart of the person who established this day because it provides a reason to make dragons.

You just need a few supplies and a few minutes and you’ll soon have a whole flock of these lovely little fellas.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• toilet paper tube
• colored paper
• crepe paper
• pom poms
• googly eyes
• scissors
• glue

First, you’ll need to decide what color of paper you want to over your empty toilet paper tube with. Spencer’s first dragon was green. (His second and third ones were red.)

(My granddaughter made a pink one, a purple one, and a red one. Who said that dragons had to be green, eh?)

Cut and glue a piece of paper around your tube. We used a hot glue gun but you can use a glue stick if you’d prefer. (Save you from getting blisters from the hot glue. Just saying.)

Then, decide what color of pom poms that you want to use for the eyes. (These are hard decisions, folks, for kids to make!)

Put two dabs of glue where you want the eyes to be and add the pom poms. Glue the googly eyes onto the pom poms. Spencer wanted to make eyebrows so he drew them on the pom poms with a black marking pen.

Glue two small pom poms on the other end of the tube where you want the nostrils to be.

Cut a strip of crepe paper for the dragon’s tongue. Or for the flames coming out of the dragon’s mouth. Glue it inside the dragon’s mouth.

And that’s it! Your dragon is finished.

Here’s a picture of Spencer’s red dragon. (I forgot to take a picture of the green one that he made. I think I was too distracted by the second degree burn on my finger . . .)

You will notice that he decided to have two pieces of crepe paper — one for his tongue and one for the fire.

Kaylissa decided that she needed to draw eyebrows on her dragon behind the pom poms. And put the nostrils in the middle of the tube. And draw a mouth. (I guess her’s has two mouths — one that she drew and one where her flames come out . . . )

Here are all of the dragons posed for their picture to be taken.

I thought that the kids would blow through the tubes to make it like the dragon was sticking out his tongue or breathing flames. But I learned something. If you glue the crepe paper to the bottom of the dragon’s ‘mouth,’ you can blow all you want but your breath won’t be able to lift up the crepe paper. You need to glue the crepe paper to the top of the dragon’s mouth.

Also, there is no way on earth that you can blow through the long tube and blow the crepe paper so it’s like the dragon is sticking his tongue out. Just. Not. Enough. Breath. (Gasp, hack, gasp . . .  pass out from hyperventilating . . . )

You can check out last year’s post about this holiday. I have some fun stick pupet dragons. Print this free dragon printable on colored paper to get different colored dragons. Or check out my resource page for free printables to use on white card stock to make red, purple, blue, black, green orange, or pink dragons.

If I were really organize, I would have been prepared to strum my guitar and sing Puff the Magic Dragon with the grandkids. Alas, I wasn’t that organized. Sigh.

I did try to get them to watch Pete’s Dragon but they weren’t interested. Rats!

Have a great time celebrating National Appreciate a Dragon Day. Hopefully, your grandkids will develop a deep appreciation for dragons. 🙂