The Day the Crayons Quit

Have you read the book,   The Day the Crayons Quit ?  We read it during a professional development day and I fell in love!  It is the cutest book about crayons who write letters to the little boy who owns them.  They all come up with reasons why they are quitting (i.e. the boy colors to sloppy, he never uses them, etc.).

 My co-teacher and I were getting ready to do a big drama unit with Mr. John from Red Kite, and I thought this would be a good book to use to create our own play adaptation.  We started by reading the book altogether.  

Then, we had the kids each pick a color and emotion out of a hat.  They had to write their own letter from the perspective of the crayon about why they were quitting.  We used webs to plan out our letters,

hand-wrote them and drew pictures,

and then typed them up.  When we typed them up, we eventually chose a fun font and changed it to be the color of the crayon.  

We put all the letters and pictures together to create our own "The Day the Crayon's Quit" book for the kids to take home!

Once our letters were finished, we started working on putting together our play.  The kids began practicing reading their scripts with emotion and choreographed movements (i.e. the sad crayon had to cry, the tired crayon had to yawn, etc.) during their part.  After some time, the students memorized their parts!  This part was really impressive to me, because all of the letters were at least 4 sentences long!  Mr. John (our musical and drama talent) also had the kids elaborate on some of their letters so that we could write songs to go along with our play. 

In the end, we had a 15 minute play that had singing, dancing, and acting done completely by the students!  The kids independently transitioned to and from the stage during their parts and everything.  I wish I could share the video with you, because they did great!  We even performed in front of a few gen ed classrooms and parents!  A huge thanks to our art teacher too for making the crayon costumes!

If you would have told me at the beginning of the year that my students would have been able to create and star in their own play, I would have thought you were crazy.  It just goes to show how much my students amaze me every day!