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Dragon Masters in 5th-Grade Reading

By Halley, Julie on April 09, 2019

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     My fifth-grade Title 1 Reading class has recently begun reading a series called the Dragon Masters. This is a series of books about boys and girls who get to become a dragon master by learning how to communicate with his/her assigned dragon. I have the first four books of this series and we are currently halfway through reading the third book. This is a series produced by Scholastic called Branches. My students have been very excited to read these books. It is so encouraging to have them come to my classroom excited about reading and even asking if we get to read the dragon books today.

     I have used this book to teach the students how to organize character traits, to make predictions based on reading cues, and to draw conclusions. They have continued to add to their character trait organizers as we read each book, even on their own without my prompting, and learn more about each character. Based on events that we have read about in each book, I thought it would be fun to let each reader draw his/her own dragon, name it, and come up with character traits to go along with their dragon. So far we have read: Dragon Masters: Rise of the Earth Dragon, Dragon Masters: Saving the Sun Dragon, Dragon Masters: Secret of the Water Dragon, and the last book is Dragon Masters: Power of the Fire Dragon. As you can tell by the book titles, each dragon is associated with different elements. The fifth-graders chose to do something similar and this also allowed their creativity to shine through. I have really enjoyed watching them get excited about reading, drawing, predicting, and bounce ideas off each other. Here are our dragon drawings, an example of our character trait organizer, and the book we are currently reading.