Reading At The Corporate Center: More Than 100 Employee Children Enjoy Little Dragon Coconut’s Latest Adventure

He’s not very big, he’s red, he wears a green cap– and he managed to keep over 100 children riveted for a whole hour, full of wonder, fascination and the occasional bout of enthusiastic applause. On Friday afternoon, the clever little dragon Coconut was the absolute star of the interactive drawing session at the Corporate Center in Gütersloh, organized by Bertelsmann's global intranet for employee children. Coconut was presented by his inventor, writer/illustrator Ingo Siegner, who whisked the kids away to a world of knights and minstrels, of ladies in distress and villains, and of dragons small and large by the sheer force of his voice, his artistic talents, his pictures and his resourceful play-acting.

Like Coconut, the children in the audience all wore wearing baseball caps - not green, but blue with a Coconut character embroidered on the front: a gift to welcome the little five- to nine-year-old dragon fans at the door. And while parents seized the opportunity to shop the employee store at leisure or enjoy a conversation over coffee and cake in the cafeteria, the spirits and sound level among the children in the cafeteria’s winter garden rose rapidly. The noise quickly dwindled when Ingo Siegner stepped onto the little stage, lovingly transformed into a dragon’s lair with plenty of paper maché. A hush fell, and the children’s book author had the children’s full attention.

Ingo Siegner had brought his very latest dragon adventure to the reading with him, “Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss und der schwarze Ritter,” just out from CBJ. In fact, it was the first time the author presented the book to the public. In his seventh adventure to date, Coconut faces the difficult task of rescuing his uncle Ingmar, who has been lured into a bad trap by the evil black knight. Now the knight is demanding to marry the delicate damsel Bruniberta – Bruniberta has been promised to whoever vanquishes the dragon, along with her castle. The damsel is disconsolate – her heart belongs to Walther von der Blumenwiese, a minstrel. Coconut has a solution: Together with Matilda and Walther, he hatches a plan to rescue Uncle Ingmar. But then Coconut and Matilda find themselves in a dragon trap of their own…

As the story unfolded and got more and more exciting – and funnier – the children quickly realized that Ingo Siegner wasn’t just playing at being a little dragon, he became little Coconut. And his best friend Matilda. And his Uncle Ingmar. And the minstrel Walther. And so on and so forth… Ingo Siegner changed voices, spoke loudly, then quietly, went low and high, changed inflections and dialects at a breathtaking rate. All of it while working a large drawing board with his marker, conjuring drawings of Coconut onto the paper with a few expert strokes. Or while pacing back and forth, or jumping up and down. All the while, he kept his audience deeply involved in the proceedings, talking to the kids, asking them questions and letting them tell him how they felt the story should continue.

Right after the reading/drawing show, the children were able to give their own imagination full rein. Armed with a large piece of paper and a box of crayons, they were given the assignment of drawing their own rendition of Little Dragon Coconut. The children were all too happy to oblige, though some of the dragons turned out quite a bit more gruesome, with a surplus of fangs, teeth and claws, than the harmless and child-friendly Coconut himself. In fact some of the dragons, mostly the ones drawn by boys, bore a marked resemblance to a variety of dinosaurs. The dragon pictures will be on display in the glass cabinet in the lower level of the Corporate Center over the next few days. As thanks for their great pictures, the children not only got to keep the crayons, but were also each given their own personal hand-signed copy of Ingo Siegner’s “Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss und der schwarze Ritter.”