Celestial Empire for Small People

As part of the Celestial Empire show at the National Library of Australia they had a morning for kids with a theme of listening to the author of a book about dragons or such like and then doing some colouring in.  As the low end of the age range was 3 we thought #1 Most Excellent Grand-daughter at 3 years and a few days - and very interested in books - might find it interesting.

This was the poster in the room of activity.

This dragon was lurking in the corner of the room. I presume someone does a dragon dance at some point in the overall exhibition.

 Here are the author (Christopher Cheng - holding the book) and illustrator (Di Wu).

The reading was well received by the audience.  A good proportion of the small people (SP) had long straight black hair!  The crowd was pretty large .

You might wish to play 'spot the grand-daughter': hint: look for the white hat.  Grandma was sitting off to the side so as not to block the view of other small people but to be close enough to be reassuring if that was needed (which it wasn't).

There seems to be a fashion for small tents for rug-rats.  Perhaps an equivalent to cubby houses?  A couple were positioned in the room and seemed to be very popular with the kids..

When we left Frances had gone to recover her bag from the locker and I found myself in the lift area with a total horde of kids.  On enquiring it turned out that they were all owned by the mums also present.  One of the Mums 'fessed to being responsible for 5, but clarified she'd borrowed a couple from neighbours.  This was a great relief, as I dreaded to think what would happen if I found myself on the ground floor with a  couple (or more) of unattended SPs!

Overall a good event.  It was a tad unstructured, but the kids seemed to enjoy themselves and certainly the authors of the book and the NLA staff should have been pleased with the roll up.