Twenty-nine September. That is the entire schedule for Michaeli, and in a lot of German, Austrian and Swiss kindergartens it is the one autumn date that arrives with a dragon attached.
The day is named for the archangel Michael, and the picture at the middle of it barely changes: a very large dragon, and one comparatively small person standing in front of it who has decided to stay. Waldorf schools keep it as a festival of courage, which is why these dragon coloring pages are worth doing slowly and in order. Your child is not coloring a monster. They are coloring the thing they get to be braver than.
Start at the fierce end
Give the first page every tooth it asks for. A dragon roaring over three mountain peaks, wings out to the paper's edge, is the version a five-year-old draws in the air with both arms before they can say why they like it. Let the scales be red. Let the sky behind it be as dark as the pencil will go.
There is a reason to begin here rather than with something sweet. A festival about courage needs something worth being brave about first, and a dragon that was cuddly from the start gives a child nothing to do.
What the dragon is standing in for
In the German Waldorf telling, the dragon is not really a beast in a field. It is whatever a person has to face in themselves at the point in the year when the light starts going: the temper, the fear of the dark corridor, the thing you did not own up to. Michael meets it. That is the whole story, and it ends with the dragon subdued rather than gone.
Coloring is a fair way to sit with that idea, because a page takes long enough that a four-year-old stops being scared of the shape somewhere around the second wing. A dragon you have spent twenty minutes with is a dragon you know the size of.
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The brave one is the small one
Look at the hero page again and notice how little space the figure on the wall takes up. That proportion is the point of the day, and children read it instantly without anyone explaining it.
This is where a shield earns its keep. Let your child design their own crest before they color it: an animal they like, a shape, the initial of their name. A kindergarten group that made shields on the Monday will carry them around all week, and a shield made for a dragon you have already met is a much better object than a shield made for nothing.
The day also used to be about counting things
Away from the kindergarten, Michaelmas had a plainer job. It was one of the four English quarter days, the date when rents came due, farm workers were hired at autumn fairs and the harvest was formally over, which is also why the university and legal term still carries the name. The National Trust for Scotland and Historic UK both keep good records of the customs, down to the aster that flowers around the date and is still sold as the Michaelmas daisy.
That is a nice thing to hand a six-year-old who wants to know why a random Tuesday matters. The answer is that it was the day the year's books were closed and the cold half began. Build the dragon a place to live while you talk about it.
By the end of the week the dragon is a friend
Here is the turn the whole set is built around. Once a child has faced the fierce version on paper, the friendly one lands differently, and it is worth saving these pages for Thursday or Friday rather than opening with them.
A dragon and a small knight having tea. A dragon toasting a marshmallow badly. These are funny, and the laugh is the point: the fear got small enough to make jokes about. If you only print two pages this week, print one from the first section and one from this one, and put them side by side on the fridge in that order.
Print the set and let the week run in order
The rest of the dragons are here: the egg, the sleeping one, the mother curled around her baby, the one in the forest, the reader, the long ribbon dragon from Chinese New Year who has nothing to do with Michaeli and is too good to leave out. If your child is simply in a dragon phase and the festival is beside the point, the slow-afternoon dragon set is the one to print instead.
What else could you color?
Pick a prompt or type your own — opens in a new tab.
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Chinese Dragon Coloring Page for Kids
Try these coloring pages!"Is the dragon the baddie?"
"No. He is the bit you get to be bigger than by Friday."
