This week, students were very excited to learn about author and illustrator, Cressida Cowell who created the How to Train Your Dragon book series. Some of our students were a little amazed when they found out about Cressida Cowell’s childhood…
“I grew up in London and on a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. The island had no houses or electricity. The name of the island is a secret, but it was such a small island it wasn’t really big enough to have a name at all. There were no roads or shops, just a storm-blown, windy wilderness of sea-birds and heather. When I was four, my family would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman and picked up again two weeks later. In those days there were no mobile phones, so we had absolutely no way of contacting the outside world during that time. If something went wrong, we just had to sit tight and hope that the boat really did come to pick us up in two weeks’ time.
By the time I was eight, my family had built a small stone house on the island, and my father got a boat so we could fish for enough food to feed the family for the summer.
From then on, every year, we spent four weeks of the summer and two weeks of the spring on the island. The house was lit by candle-light and there was no telephone or television – so I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories. In the evening my father told us tales of the Vikings who invaded this island Archipelago twelve hundred years before, and of the quarrelsome Tribes who fought and tricked each other and of the legends of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs.”
We asked our students to think about what they would do without any electronic devises – and after the initial shock – many said they would like to draw and write stories like Cressida. As well as, run around, play hide and go seek, have scavenger hunts, swim and play board games.
Students were keen to get going creating their own dragons… After their initial sketch, students added more details with with sharpies & oil pastels and then began experimenting with red & blue watercolours. Some wanted to mix colours together into purple and everyone added salt as a resist for the final touches to create a scaly texture on their dragons, as well as a few “galaxy” effect backgrounds….
And a few students chose to make little baby dragons….
Terrific work everyone! I love the creativity, sparking imaginations and laughter filling our classroom.