The Day The Crayons Quit

Let's talk about one of my FAVORITE picture books... The Day The Crayons Quit.

The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!


The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!

If you haven't read it, you absolutely must! It is the story of a boy named Duncan who opens his box of crayons to find a stack of letters addressed to him. Each letter has been written by a different crayon, each with a grievance or celebration of some sort. The issues range from being overworked to overlooked to under-dressed! You can find an online reading of it here:


Well, my students are hooked. They have asked me repeatedly to re-read it (especially the letter from Peach Crayon, but I'm not giving anything away!) and I've obliged of course! Naturally, I'm jumping all over their enthusiasm and working this into my language lessons.

We've spent time on letter writing, point of view/perspective, and the writing trait "voice" in some of our writing lessons lately. The kids were asked to think about their own crayon box and choose a crayon color. Their job was to think about that crayon in the context of their own box, consider what it was typically used for, how it would feel, and what it would want from its owner. Next, we shifted our perspectives, wrote letters as the crayons, and created a book-inspired picture to accompany each writing piece.

Here are a couple of early examples of what my students created:

The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!

The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!

 The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!

 The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!

I think they are super-cute, personally, and my students have been very motivated. I'm already thinking ahead to how I'll approach this slightly differently next year, but I'll certainly use the mentor text again!

If you'd like to use my planning and art sheets (yep, I drew the crayons in the style of the book!) you can access them in my subscriber freebie library! (Current subscribers, you'll find the password in the latest email!)

The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!
I'd love it if you would follow my blog and/or leave me a comment if you use them! I'd love to gather some fresh ideas for next year!

Find more great writing activities on this Pinterest board:


And grab more great picture book suggestions on THIS Pinterest board:


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The Day the Crayons Quit is a great mentor text to get your students inspired to write! Take a look at the story and grab a FREE art template that will serve as the perfect writing inspiration for the students in your elementary classroom!

4 comments

  1. Wow! What an awesome blog! I just stumbled upon it through Pinterest yesterday. I love that you have so many unique, creative ideas! I think I'm going to make a Swiper for my classroom...too fun! :)

    Thanks for sharing!

    Jessica
    Mrs. Heeren's Happenings

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am SO glad you found me, Jessica! Your blog is adorable as well! I'm your newest follower!

      ~Erin

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  2. I'm a student teacher and next week I've been asked to teach 5 literacy lessons to my Year 2 class (ages 6-7) focussed on 1 book and I was looking to use this book!
    I wondered if you could help me though as I'm struggling to find 5 activities to do for Literacy? So far I have:
    - To consider the feelings of others and to undergo role-play where the children explain why they're feeling sad to their partner and their partner responds with what they're going to do to help them/make them feel better.
    - Opinion writing - the children pick a colour that they want to use and a colour that they don't want to use and with this they write a piece where they explain why they want to use this colour over the other colour, focussing on a balanced argument.
    - Writing a letter from Duncan. I was going to do this as the first lesson so that I can do it before the book has finished. This way they don't know what Duncan really decides to do and gives the children more of an opportunity to explore alternative endings.
    - To create a poster titled "I QUIT!" where one of the crayons lists their reasons for quitting and what they want to change

    And now I'm struggling for my 5th lesson....

    Please help! I'm 19 and I'm pretty inexperienced as I'm in my first year of training!

    ReplyDelete
  3. my e-mail address is: hannahgibbs1994@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete

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