Dragon Dancing - Hardcover

Carole Lexa Schaefer and Pierr Morgan have collaborated on many books together, including Cool Time Song and Someone Says, a School LibraryJournal Best Book of the Year. They both live in Washington State.
Carole Lexa Schaefer and Pierr Morgan have collaborated on manybooks together, including Cool Time Song and Someone Says, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. They both live in Washington State.

Readers familiar with The Squiggle (1996) and Someone Says (2003) will recognize this book's ethnically diverse classroom and its spare but jubilant depictions of imaginative play. After their teacher reads a book about dragons, a group of children, led by the same pigtailed girl who spearheaded the previous books' pretending games, fashions art supplies into a "sparkle-head dragon" with a ribbon tail. The children then go "dragon dancing" through a playground transformed into Asian-influenced landscapes, their movements expressed in read-aloud-friendly phrases such as "mish-mooshing" and "la-dee-daw-dawdling." The children's immersion in their fantasy is gracefully captured by Morgan's economical artwork, in which the whimsical dragon craft project takes on a life of its own, then dissolves into loose scribbles as the children dreamily return to themselves. The substance of the first two books is not much altered here, but the bustling energy of preschoolers comes through with just as much affection, and the parading-dragon premise will be of particular use around celebrations of the Chinese New Year. Jennifer Mattson
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