Dragon Egg Craft

Summer holidays are finally here - and one week in I'm recovering from a cold, and slowly re-emerging to feel re-connected and centred in all the things we enjoy doing together... 

I wanted to share this little craft that we've made over the last week because it ticks all the boxes of things I love in a craft!...

The children - this time Romy - came up with it all by themselves

It was completely free to make

We used up/recycled existing materials we had lying around
 

We all got involved at the various stages - Daddy helped with the painting and collecting of sticks, whilst I found the left-over plastic easter-eggs & buckets that we've used for the nests, helped with the paper-mache etc...   

 We used some research skills by looking at the art work of Jackie Morris and in Romy's Dragonology book to find out what dragon eggs actually look like 

We managed to incorporate some nature foraging/getting outside into the mix

It was/is so simple, yet original and...

 Has already yielded a good few hours of collaborative imaginative play

And 

Best of all...

REAL DRAGONS are going to be hatching out of them in about somewhere between one week and three years' time!! ;-) 

It's true! (Phase 2 of the project is to make some dragons... whether or not that will happen I don't yet know but I love the enthusiasm!) 

Romy has a love of dragons and all things mythical, and randomly asked one day towards the end of last week if we could make some dragon eggs... I thought it was a cute and do-able idea so we got to work... we basically paper-mache'd over some old and slightly damaged plastic eggs that I had left over from an Easter egg hunt 2 years ago, painted them with acrylic paint, and used some old tye-dyed baby feeding cloths (a craft from several years ago), and nature objects/sticks etc as nesting materials. The baskets are from Easter... felt kind of appropriate given that they not so long ago housed some eggs of a different kind...

It's been lovely to see both children so embroiled in their dragon world, and reminds me of how much pride children can take in their work when it is something of their own devising, and how planning and accomplishing such projects, however big or small, are little feats of self-mastery, and can truly set the sparks of their imaginations on fire! (see what I did there?!? dragons... fire... he he he...)