First Grade Friendly Letters

I’m sure you have all read “The Day the Crayons Quit”, but if you haven’t, before I even start, you better go order it 😉 {affiliate link}

It’s a hilarious story about crayons who write letters to their owner {a little boy, Duncan} about their “jobs” as crayons. Some like coloring, some don’t…

I read this to my students when we were working on our friendly letters unit.

I then had them all choose their favorite color crayon from their crayon boxes {mind you, this was the end of the year, so many of their crayons were in my “lost crayons” box}.

After they chose their favorite color, I had them list {in crayon for fun} the things that that color crayon colors {ex. a red crayon colors fire, fire trucks, and fireman}.

Next I had the students decide if their crayons were happy/mad/sad about their job coloring. Most of my students picked happy {just because it was their favorite crayon, so why would their crayon be sad}.

Then as you can see from these examples, we wrote a very guided letter together, addressing it to themselves! They got to fill in the blanks with their own thoughts and signed it as the crayon.

{here’s an angry crayon :)}

We wrote our final drafts on some nice paper.

{I couldn’t tell if this guy was happy or crazed with anger ;)}

I also found these CUTE crayon buddies from Cara Carroll! They worked perfectly with this lesson!

{I actually printed them 2 to a page so the crayons would be a little smaller.I also used big eyes from some other craft I had.}

We colored our crayons the color we chose {making sure the expressions matched how they felt about their jobs}. We also drew pictures on top of our letters, but only using the color we chose.

{This little crayon KILLED me. My whole class was obsessed with how cute he was!}

The classroom display looked amazing! So bright and colorful! I can’t tell you how proud my firsties were about this project. They kept begging me to be able to take their crayons home, I couldn’t keep them on the wall for very long 😉

Also, I’ve been scoring Pinterest and found some other cute ideas for this book.

{affiliate link}