The first dragon is about fallacies of ambiguity and she rules over a swamp.
I did some research about swamps and described swamp flora and fauna in accurate terms, although different kinds of swamps were mixed indiscriminately. The notion here was that the student would research real swamp information and recognize this. This would not only give them some good knowledge about the biosphere, but teach them something about the dangers of accepting information from stories.
The fog in the swamp is a metaphor for ambiguity.
The first place they visit is peopled by snails. (New Zealand Muscala - Amphibola crenata, the Mud Snail found commonly on high-tidal mud flats.)
They live on a little island in the swamp made of horn blende. (a dark-green to black mineral of the amphibole group, calcium magnesium iron and hydroxyl aluminosilicate)
They are enslaved by the logical fallacy "amphiboly." (The structure of a sentence has more than one possible meaning. Examples: "Young men and women" Are the women young too? It is not clear. "Who is the doctor?" Are they asking the question to find out the name of the doctor or are they asking the question to confirm that the doctor's name is Dr. Who.)
I believed this would be fun and that it would give a teacher a lot to work with in terms of talking about how language changes over time, etc. by comparing the usage of the various forms of the word "amphibious" in these different terms.
Their island is full nonsense as a metaphor for the kind of fallacy they have fallen victim to. For instance, kitchen appliances do not work out in the middle of nowhere without electrical infrastructure. This is possibly a hook for discussing suspension of disbelief as well as assignments researching technological infrastructure supporting modern civilization.
Because they are under the spell of the Brown Dragon the snails constantly talk in amphibolies and argue about the misunderstandings caused by them. I tried to always show by the conversation that what was said had more than one meaning, so that the reader would get the feel for the amphiboly fallacy. For instance: "Our island is bigger than any island in the marsh," can be construed as not true since it is not bigger than itself. "I am concerned that people who heard the ducks have been quacking," could mean the people have been quacking or the ducks have been quacking. Obviously in these simple examples one of the grammatically correct constructions is nonsense, but in the heat of argument such statements are often said in contexts that make meaning unclear and derail useful discussions into passionate misunderstandings.
The character Red has the surname Yellow, blue skin, and describes himself as brown, because he is under the Brown Dragon's spell. This introduces a theme that appears throughout the story to help the reader think beyond appearances, particularly skin color. The inhabitants of Low Check, Low Checkers, consistently describe people's color based on things other than skin color, and are puzzled by Trudy and Jay wanting to use it to identify people. Interestingly my own attempts to rise above skin color to describe people in the story failed, which probably makes it a bit confusing in places. Hopefully, this will give rise to some revealing discussions.
People under the dragons' spells vary in their awareness of it and their ability to overcome it. Red and his friends are aware they are enslaved, but do not understand how it works, continuing to believe the dragon's lies, while at the same time wishing to be free. This variance between people is also a consistent theme throughout the book. The idea is to introduce the critical thinking necessary to keep from categorizing people into broad groups, instead of dealing with them as individuals.
The town itself has visible, nonsensical evidence of equivocation fallacies - light items that do not give light, burying money in mud banks, people rolling around after eating hot dogs so they can have rolls with the hot dogs, etc.
Each of the dragons has a helper that is colored black. Children may need help noticing these characters. All of these characters reappear at the climax of the book, and remembering what was said to and by them, becomes important in understanding the final battle. The lesson here is that we must not be too quick to filter out information before we have a complete picture of the problem to be solved.
I did not do as much research outside of the field of logic with the rest of the dragons as I did with the first one. However, the various environments and nonsensical technology continues, and with these, the opportunities to talk about the suspension of disbelief, the dangers of accepting factual information from stories, and hooks for outside research in geography, biology, geology, and the science of technology.