A blog post about helping first graders write 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.
And after ALL that…did you know??? Drew Daywalt has a follow up book too! I’m ordering mine today!
{affiliate link}
Steven says
I did a little spin on this for an observation last year, instead of choosing a crayon I had my second graders pick ANY item in our classroom (easel, desk, chair, market, clock, printer, pocket chart, etc.) and it came out AWESOME. i made a class book of it, it was a great activity for June
Jen says
That is such a cool idea!
Mahera Goel says
What a lovely idea 🙂 – We bought it for collaboration PD and team work and cooperation for students
Debbie tarash says
would you happen to have a copy to share of the framed letter you had the kids write.