All posts by RP Admin

Colouring, Our Favourite Printables, Spring

St George’s Day Printables

If you’re looking for things to print out for St George’s Day this year, we’ve gathered all ours together below.  You might also want to check out our general dragon page for further ideas.

First off, here are a couple of St George certificates:

We have some dragon certificates available too, which might come in handy.  Here are a couple of examples – click here to see more:

We’ve also got some knight and dragon-themed colouring:

Looking to decorate your home or classroom?  You might find something useful in our collection of St George’s Day bunting:

You might also like these free printable greetings cards:

St George’s Day Story for Young Children

One of the problems with the St George’s Day story is that like many old tales, it can be viewed as a bit violent and sexist by today’s standards.  While this isn’t such an issue for older children who can understand it’s of its time, it can make it hard to tell to little ones.  With this in mind, we’ve created what we hope is a slightly more child-friendly version of the story.  We haven’t changed the core narrative, but we have retold it by:

  • making it clear that this particular dragon was dangerous and cruel;
  • empowering the princess to take part in deciding her own fate, rather than just being treated as an object for her father to give away as a prize in a male battle;
  • glossing over the violence of the fight between the dragon and George, which in many of the older stories is a bit gory and drawn out.

The PDF of our St George’s Story for Children is free to download and we hope you find it useful.

St George Activity Idea for Older Children:
If you are dealing with older rather than younger children, you could create a great learning activity by telling them a more adult version of the story and asking them how they would change it to tell to a younger child, or to suit a modern audience.

Other Activities:

This St George’s Day word search is another fun printable activity.  Just click/tap it to download the free PDF.

There are two more word searches below which are suitable for St George’s Day.

Easter, Spring

Easter Picks

Ah spring.  (At least if, like us, you’re in the northern hemisphere.)  The lambs, the daffodils, the bluebells, the light.  Goodness, we’ve missed the light.  And of course, Easter around the corner.  It’s always a bit of rush in our house to get everything done, unlike Christmas, which seems to be hanging around from September onwards these days.  We always feel that Easer rather jumps out from around the proverbial corner – and a mad scramble for eggs, decorations and magical Easter Bunny printables is pretty much guaranteed.  Talking of which, our top picks for this year are below…

Easter Bunny Certificates:

We’ve built up quite a few of these over the years, and you can find all of them on this page.  However, our four favourites are a follows:

Easter Bunny Letters and/or Notes

As with the certificates, we’ve created a fair few of these now but these are the ones we like the best.  Hopefully, you’ll like them too:

Easter Bunny Letter: My Secret Chocolate Factory
Easter Bunny Letter: My Secret Chocolate Factory

Easter Decorations:

From the minute the Easter Holidays start it can be great fun to gather up some children and make the house look lovely.   The spring decorations we like most are below, though it’s also worth hunting around the internet for more such things, for as much as we’d love you to stay on this site forever, there are lots of other gorgeous decorative ideas out there.

Easter Bilby Resources:

Okay, so we’re based in the UK, but we love the idea of the Easter Bilby and for any Australians out there, these are the four bilby resources to make sure you don’t miss:

Easter Fairy Newspaper

Our Easter issue of our printable fairy newspaper, The Midnight Messenger is also available as a bit of free magic for your child.  It’s best read in the run-up to Easter and will let your child know all about what’s going in the Easter Bunny’s chocolate factory under the ground.

 

Colouring, Popular

Schoolwork Achievement Certificates

We’ve had a lot of requests for achievement certificates for schoolwork this month, possibly to help encourage children to keep up with their children during lockdown.  If you’re a parent helping with your child’s learning, well done, you’re doing a great job and our thoughts are with you.

We’ll add to these printable certificates over the next few days, but here’s what we’ve got so far:

Our Award from the Council of Dragons is always popular too!

Printable children's certificate saying you've been as clever as a dragon.
Clever as a Dragon

You might also like these school-themed resources:

Winter

Useful Printables for January

Happy new year!  We hope 2021 brings much joy and magic to you and your little ones.

January is always a quiet month for our site but for those of you who have taken the time to pop by (thanks!), we’ve collected together what we think are the most useful printables for this month.  Many are old favourites but there are one or two new resources as well.  Just scroll down and you’ll find them below…

January can be a good time to get the family active again after all those Christmas goodies, so these certificates might come in useful too:

Oh… and don’t forget it’s Burns Night on Jan 25th!
Finally, there’s always time for fairy messages, no matter what the time of year.  Whether you’re writing your own or using some of our fairy notes and certificates, here are a few of our favourites:

And for anyone looking for a relaxing (not to mention decorative!) start to the new year, here’s a bit more printable colouring:

Autumn

Remembrance Day Printables

It’s so important to remember those who laid down their lives in the hope of of keeping the rest of us safe, that we might inherit a better world.  Of course, we remember them for more than just one day a year, but Remembrance Day is a chance to do so together, and with that in mind, below are the printables we’ve got which we think might be useful for this day.

The British Legion need your donations more than ever due to Covid-19.  You can donate to their Poppy Appeal here: britishlegion.org.uk/get-involved/ways-to-give/donate

While Remembrance Sunday is always the second Sunday in November, Remembrance Day in the UK is on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  On that day at 11:00 GMT a two-minute silence is usually observed to commemorate those who died in conflict.  Remembrance Day is also called “Armistice Day”.

Our Favourite Printables, Popular

Covid Printables

It’s miserable being in the middle of a pandemic, but we’ve put together these printables which you might find useful while the world tries to cope with the coronavirus crisis.  They’re meant to be light-hearted and to stop children feeling too anxious.

If you want to create your own Tooth Fairy certificate, you can find our blank templates here.

Has your child been feeling anxious about the pandemic?  An award for bravery might help.  It won’t take fear away of course, but it could help your little one feel proud of the way he or she is coping.  A little bit of praise and acknowledgement is something we all need from time to time.

Covid Christmas Letters

Finally, if you want to print a magical Father Christmas letter to say well done for coping so well with Covid restrictions, you can find one here.

Autumn, Colouring, Halloween

Halloween Ghosts

Looking for some ghosts to print out for Halloween?  Here’s our collection.  We hope you have fun decorating!

One great way to use all these different ghost characters is to thread them all along a string.  They look great!  Oh, and don’t forget that you can also use out blank ghost template to draw your own.

Autumn, Seasons, Thanksgiving

Harvest Festival Printables

Autumn is upon us (in the UK anyway) and so is the time of harvest.  In fact, did you know that the Old English word “haerfest” actually means “autumn”?  Yes, indeed, and for those of you looking for some harvest festival printables for your children to help celebrate, we’ve assembled ours below.

When is Harvest Festival (UK)?

Harvest Festival is celebrated on the nearest Sunday to the Harvest Moon (that’s the full moon nearest to the September equinox).  This year in the United Kingdom, the Harvest Festival Feast will fall on Sunday 4th October 2020.  (The equinox is actually the day after, on the 23rd.)  However, harvest celebrations in general take place over several days, so it doesn’t really matter when you have yours.  Traditionally, it was never held after Michaelmas Day on the 29th September though, because that’s when the church decided that the Harvest Festival period should officially end.  The idea was that all the crops had to be brought in before St Michael’s Mass and that parishes would then gather in their churches to give thanks.  These days, dates are not as strict.

Picture of a corn dolly twist
Corn Dolly Twist

That said, traditions surrounding bringing in the harvest predate Christianity, in the UK going back to at least Saxon times.  Some of the very old traditions are feasting, dancing and playing games.  Making corn dollies was also popular, which were carefully kept in people’s homes as a tribute to the Spirit of the Corn or Goddess of the Grain, in the hope that he or she would make sure there was a good harvest the following year.  Not all corn dollies were made in the shape of a doll mind you, some were woven to look like bells, crosses, knots, spirals and animals such as hares and horses.  Different parts of the country often had their own corn dolly traditions.

All in all, Harvest Festival time was a chance to come together and have fun, to be thankful for whatever the land had supplied, and to lift people’s spirits and put them in a positive frame of mind, ready to get through the winter.

After all that of course, we’re in the run up to Halloween…

Of course, some of the printables above are also useful for Thanksgiving.

Midnight Messenger, Our Favourite Printables, Summer

Fairyland Newspaper: Summer Issue

Summer Issue of a magical newspaper, the Midnight Messenger, lying on a table scattered with daisies.
The Midnight Messenger – Fairyland’s Newspaper! (Summer Issue)

Hello dear visitors!  By popular demand, we’ve uploaded a summer issue of our Fairyland newspaper, the Midnight Messenger, for you to print for your child.  We especially hope it will help entertain those of you still in lockdown around the world or who are having to self-isolate thanks to Covid-19.

In this issue you can find out what’s been happening at Christmas House, where the Easter Bunny has been on holiday and what the Tooth Fairy’s been up to as of late.  As always, our thanks to Leone Betts for all her hard work putting it together and for allowing us to make it free on this site.

Are you looking for the previous issue? It’s here.

What is the Midnight Messenger?

The Midnight Messenger is the newspaper which gets delivered all around the magical world – read by everyone from Santa and his elves to the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and every other magical personality you can think of. And this summer, your child can read it too!

We’ve uploaded it as a PDF.  Just click here or on the picture below to download or view it.  It’s completely free.  We hope it makes you and your little ones smile.

Download the summer issue of the Midnight Messenger!

P. S.

If you enjoy this resource, please consider telling others. Our site survives because of people like you using it. Thanks x

More About the Midnight Messenger:

For those of you after more information about our Fairyland newspaper, it was first created in 2003 by L A Betts. It was early days for our site and as we didn’t have many visitors back then, after a couple of years we retired it. However, it carried on being delivered every month to magical folk of course, and has often mentioned in our other creations, such as the Father Christmas letters.

The Midnight Messenger is normally in black and white, but special issues like the one for Easter, are in colour. It regularly features news from well-known parts of the magical world, like Father Christmas’s house in the North Pole, and features many familiar characters such as Jack Frost, the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy. But it also features new characters your child won’t have heard of, such as the Worrying Witch, the Fortune-Telling Toad and all sorts of goblins, fairies and elves.

It’s always hard to know what people want more of, but if we sense the Midnight Messenger is popular, we’ll consider adding further issues to our site.