The Blue Dragon
Programme 2: The Grouping Game

Aims

The programme aims to encourage children to think about classification through ideas and questions that the characters in the story raise.

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Outline

In this episode Cinders, the blue dragon, wonders where her mother is and wanders around asking a range of animals, including ducks, 'Are you my mother?' The characters begin to group according to how many legs they have, whether they have feathers, and matching tracks.

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Curriculum Relevance

The programme explores:

• animal life cycles;
• grouping animals;
• different kinds of animals.

There are many curriculum links that can be made, for example:

    English – creating riddles.
    Design Technology – design a recipe for a meal using potatoes.
    Art – design a poster about potatoes.
    Maths – sorting into groups.

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Background

The series develops The Blue Dragon Cookery Book. From this programme children could collect pictures of different kinds of potatoes to place in the Big Book, eg King Edward, Desiré, as well as pictures from magazines of different foods that are made from potatoes. For example

• frozen chips
• French fries
• roasted potatoes
• potato waffles

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Activities

Classification is an important concept in science and children are expected to be able to sort and group animals according to key physical characteristics, such as feathers, number of legs, whether they live in water, etc. Classifying relies on children recognising similarities rather than differences.

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© 4 Ventures 2004