The Crayon Box that Talked: read and create

We read The Crayon Box that Talked when we talk about being peaceful, being kind, and appreciating that we all have unique talents and abilities. It is a wonderful story about the importance of diversity.

Many American schools read it as part of Martin Luther King Jr Day activities.

Whenever it is read, it is a fun book with a good lesson.

The Crayon Box That Talked
written by Shane DeRolf
illustrated by Michael Letzig
published by Random House Books for Young Readers (1997)

summary A girl buys a box of crayons and takes them home. When she opens up the box, she sees that they crayons are unkind to each other - even though they really don't know why they say mean things.

The girl shows the crayons how all are important and necessary by drawing a picture using all of them. By the end of the story, the crayons appreciate the contributions that each make.

My favourite page in the book is when all the crayons are happily dancing across the page, working and creating together.

Isn't that what we want for our classrooms - everyone working together, appreciating each other.

We create "dancing crayons" to put up in our classroom, reminding us how all of us are needed for the picture to be complete.

The kids choose what colour crayon they want to create, and then use a tracer to create a crayon shape.

Using a tracer is a great fine motor skills work out for little hands. The "helper hand" needs to put firm pressure on the tracer so that it does not move, and the printing hand needs to move the pencil right around the perimeter of the tracer. Lots of concentration required.

More fine motor work with cutting out the crayon.

Time to decorate the crayons. We noticed that in the book, the crayons were only decorated withe their own colours. Purple was decorated only with purple. Green with green. You get the drift. But they had all sorts of different decorations.

We endeavoured to decorate the crayons the same way. No pictures as a result of making sure that all reports of using the wrong colour for decorations were false - and providing glue and googly eyes.

After the decorated crayons were glued onto legal sized paper, it was time to add the dancing arms and legs.

Some looked like the arms and legs from the book,

others had their own style.

Whatever their style, our dancing crayons are a reminder that we are better -- and we have more fun -- when everyone is included and appreciated for what they bring to our community.