Fairytale Funkiness
My photo accompaniment to this story isn’t great, but I captured the shot on the run, so it’s all I have. As I’m sure you are aware by now if you’ve been reading this blog, I am the PTA Literacy Chair at my younger son’s elementary school, and I set up a Reading Ninjas program to get kids excited about reading. This included a bulletin board display, with each kid’s name put up as soon as they earned five points in the program.
A helper and I made a trip to the teacher’s center to try to find some die-cuts (shapes) that went along with the Reading Ninja theme. Rather disappointingly, there were no actual ninjas, and no Chinese stars…although those might have been frowned upon anyways… So, we used dragons, both the big Chinese dragons and the little Pete’s Dragons (if any of you remember Pete’s Dragon). And then some sunbursts that I thought vaguely resembled Chinese stars. But not enough to get anyone in trouble (i.e. me).
We lined the board in black craft paper and bordered it in red and then added the letters for ‘Reading Ninjas.’ Next came the white Chinese dragons, which we used as grade markers, and finally the little dragons and sunbursts. I was rather pleased with the whole effect.
Until…I was in the library yesterday, and the librarian’s aide came up to me and said that teachers had been talking to her. Teachers plural. Teachers had been asking that I switch the orientation of the Chinese dragons, because as it was, with the starbursts (Chinese stars) behind them, it kind of looked like they were coming out of… She didn’t finish her sentence, but I turned around in shocked amusement to stare at the board. It was a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but these are elementary students, and evidently the situation in the dragon’s rear was a topic of conversation.
I switched the Chinese dragons around today, and now it looks like they’re breathing fire! I meant to take before and after photos, but I was distracted by an adult Snow White biking up to the school at the same time I was walking in. She was fully costumed, wigged, and wearing lace-up heeled boots, and she never came fully in, just waited in the school lobby. It was quite the mystery… Anyway, you’ll just have to use your imagination regarding the dragon’s gassy state.
In other news, I have to say that I am utterly wowed by the efforts taken by Blake Leyers and Bex to get my countdown widget up on their blogs. Blake worked herself into a Yosemite Sam style tizzy and then eventually just dedicated a blog post and tab to the AUSTENTATIOUS countdown, and Bex debugged and brought in outside support until she finally got it working for WordPress blogs. You ladies are rock stars! So, if you have a WordPress blog and you’d like to post the widget for a chance to win an ARC of AUSTENTATIOUS, click here for Bex’s code.
09/29/2011 at 1:55 am
I feel sorry for the library assistant, and it made me wonder what was next on her to do list after “deal with dragons”
09/29/2011 at 3:18 am
Oh, I totally felt sorry for her. She could barely look me in the eye!
09/29/2011 at 3:21 am
Yet another reason to fear dragons.
09/30/2011 at 2:34 pm
That just looks cool–seriously fierce and Chinese.
Wonder if the Snow White was some kind of birthday-gram? That’s my theory.
10/02/2011 at 2:41 am
LOVE the story of the fire er . . . breathing dragons. I have no doubt in my mind that my kids would’ve made the same observation.
Also, thanks for the acknowledgement.
Bex absolutely saved the day (and my sanity)!