Imaginative Storytelling - Spring Showers Make Flower Dragon Shine

Storytelling is a magical way to boost creativity and spark connection with your kiddos.

Safari Ltd. figurines are the perfect story starters. Grab one of your favorite figures and weave a magical tale with the help of your children. You can take turns coming up with what happens next, or one person can decide on a setting or problem while the other chooses the figurines for characters. Having the figures act out the stories is one of the best parts! There are so many fun ways to tell stories with toys! 

Check out the fabulous example of a fun story that was inspired by our Flower Dragon:

 Spring Showers Make Flower Dragon Shine!

When spring begins, life starts anew. The flowers begin to bloom, birds flit through the sky, and Flower Dragons come out of their overwinter dens and nests, ready for the warm weather.

There is one problem, though: So long in the dark and cold made their scales lose their vibrancy. No longer are they the brilliant colors that the dragons are known for, but instead dull brown and greys, like a tree that sheds its leaves in winter.

While Flower Dragons relish the warm weather and sun spring brings when winter draws to its end, sunshine alone won’t fix their scale problem. No, they need something more. Something very specific.

It took a week before the first real rainstorm came.

Huddled together in their dens, waiting out the downpour, Flower Dragons watch the storm expectantly. As soon as it ends, they can fix their problem. Parents tell their children about how much fun it’ll be to shed their scales, how they had to wait for the rain, and not to be scared. The thunder is just loud. The lightning happens; it’s not another dragon coming to hurt them.

Slowly but surely, the storm calms, and the rain fades. The sun comes out again.

The older dragons know the way. They lead the young to a very specific part of their homeland,somewhere they had been before, but never like this. A clearing in the forest where the rain came down in buckets and buckets during the storm. No grass grows here, leaving the entire area one giant mud pool.

This is what they had been looking for.

Now, Flower Dragons are immensely prideful — if you had scales in their brilliant colors, you might hesitate to get into something like mud, too. The young had never encountered anything like this before. It was even more confusing when their parents and other dragons waded into the pool without any hesitation.

“It’s good, come in!”

“It will help your scales come back!”

Slowly, the young ones find their way into the mud. It was cool against their bodies, and the squelching became bearable after a moment.

“Roll over,” Their parents say. So they do. And yes, they do learn that a mud bath is fun. It isn’t too much longer before they start coming up with their own games to play — baking the mud into shapes with their fire, chasing other young ones through hardened tunnels they create.

And while they play, the mud gets under their scales in a way nothing else could. After a while,their roughhousing makes their dull, colorless scales begin to loosen and fall off.

When the day is over, their parents bring them to a river to clean themselves. Mud might be fun, but it is a big mess. They couldn’t have that all in their dens. As they bound from the river, the young dragons stop to gawk at what the mud has done.

Without the hard, tough scales of their winter set, their new, bright scales can come in. Already, they could see new patches of green and yellow on their bodies.

While they might return on occasion to stomp in the mud when wet weather comes, they won’t roll about as they did after the first rains came. When the mud gets beneath their shiny new scales, it’s much harder to get out.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t look forward to the next winter to come and the mud bath that will be waiting for them.

*SafariFan story cred goes to Hope from Louisville, KY