Topic: The Day the Crayons Came Home

Recommended Grade Level: 1-4

Objectives:

• Students will recall the different colors of crayons from the story and important descriptors for each crayon.
• Each student will choose a different crayon color from the crayon box and write a postcard for that crayon’s personality.
• Students will design and build a new house for their crayons out of cardboard and other materials.

 

Materials:

• “The Day the Crayons Came Home” book
• Used crayons (big bucket of broken and used crayons)
• Pencils
• Card stock
• Cardboard
• Tape
• Scissors
• Molds
• Heat source

 

Essential Questions:

    How do you design a project? How do you build it?

Lesson 1:

• Introduce students to the bucket of crayons.
  • How many colors do you think are in here?
  • What do your crayons come in?
  • Have you lost any crayons before?
  • How do you think they feel about being lost?
• Read “The Day The Crayons Came Home”
• Students will now choose a new friend from the crayon bucket to write about.
• Pass out pencils and paper. Students will write their postcard rough drafts on paper before cardstock.
• Once students finish their rough draft they may move to card stock where they will also decorate their final postcard and draw a picture of their crayon traveling the world.

 

Lesson 2:

• As a class, discuss the home the boy made for his discarded crayons again. What special things did he think about? What did he make it out of? Design a home for your crayons together on the board.
• Have students break off individually with pencils and paper. They will begin to design their crayon houses on paper. ( they will finish their postcards before doing this step.)
• Once done, students will make sure to label all of their features and highlight the materials that they will use a majority of in their buildings.
• They must approve their plans through their Forman (the teacher) before they start building.
• They must spend the rest of the time working on their crayon buildings.

 

Lesson 3

• Students will come right in and continue working on their buildings.
• Have them pick a few extra broken crayons from the bucket to live in the building.

 

Lesson 4

• Students will finish up their buildings.
• They will display them their tables, the class will go around to each crayon home and talk about what they did.
• Each of them will get a cupcake wrapper with their name on it. They will take the crayons that lived in their crayon homes and take off any wrappers and break them smaller before placing them in the cupcake wrappers. The teacher will bring them to the kitchen oven to repurpose the old crayons into new ones. These crayons will go home as little gifts.

 

Assessment
At the end of this activity, students will take a mobile device and write a paragraph of their buildings and why they built what they built for their broken crayons. This will include photos and building plans. Students will describe the process and what they learned to demonstrate meeting objectives and improved critical thinking skills.