The Loathsome Dragon

Title: The Loathsome Dragon
Author: David Wiesner & Kim Kahng
Publisher: Clarion Books
Publication Date: 1987
Illustrator: David Wiesner
Genre Designation: Folk
Readability Lexile: 1-3 (ages 6-8)

Summary:
This is a story about a beautiful princess whose father the king falls in love with a beautiful but mean lady.  During a moment of jealousy, the new queen turns the Princess into a dragon.  This is when the prince decides that he must save his sister and show the King who the new Queen really is.  The story shows the problems that arise for the Prince as he tries to free his sister, but continues to run into problems as the queen tries to foil his plan.  In the end we see the Prince beating the queen and releasing the princess from the Queen’s spell, and in return turning the Queen into a frog. 

Evaluation:
When I started this blog, I decided that no matter what the story was I would always start my evaluation with the question of whether or not it was a good story?  In my opinion this story was not one of my favorites, for this reading level.  The word choice within the story goes well with this genre, however this could lead to some difficulties when young readers are trying to read and process the story.  I found the story a bit long and bland, which I think can be attributed to some of the text used.  The story didn’t really show a lot of character growth because we didn’t really know a lot about the characters before they began dealing with their problem.  Even though the story is set in a far, far away time the way in which the characters are developed make it a fantasy story that young readers will have a hard time relating to.  The author did use foreshadowing in the story by letting the reader know what would need to happen in order for the Princess to be released from the spell.  We also saw this when the King brought the Queen home and he told us that she was beautiful on the outside but had an evil side as well.  As the reader we also saw personification in the story by seeing the snake exhibiting human traits, as well as the frog at the end. 

Illustrations:
The illustrations were nice, however I felt like they did not lend themselves to a young reader who may be using them to decode what the text may be telling them as well as they should have.  At times the illustration gave a vague image of what the text was communicating to the reader. 

Mini-lesson:
This mini lesson will focus on rhyming.  Students will make their very own crown.  We will start by allowing the students to pick a colored piece of paper.  On their crown they will write either snake or frog and then write words that rhyme focusing on keeping the “ake” or the “og” letters to make their word family.  Once the students have written their words we will work together to connect their crowns to sentence strips so they can be Kings or Queens for the rest of the day.