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Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The Day the Crayon's Got Back to Work

The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywat and illustrations by Oliver Jeffers


The Day the Crayons Quit is a favorite at our school! The teachers love it, the students love it, the librarian loves it!
The boy in the book named Duncan finds a stack of letters in his crayon box. It turns out the letters are from his crayons. They all seem to have some type of problem. For instance, the red crayon is tired because he is always working so hard to color all things red. He even complains about working on holidays like Christmas and Valentine's Day. So he asks Duncan for a break. All the letters are quite clever. An all time favorite is the peach crayon. His wrapper was peeled off and he is hiding in the crayon box because he claims to be in his birthday suit, if you know what I mean. Everyone is usually rolling by the time this page comes around. 

I decided to do an activity with my students after we finished this book. I told the children to listen closely to each problem the crayon had. I asked them to find a way for Duncan to solve the problem. I read the book and then challenged the kids to choose a color and write a thank you note to Duncan. The thank you note had to be written in response to him solving the crayon's problem. The letter had to be written from the perspective of one of Duncan's crayons. Finally, they could illustrate the resolution.
The kids loved this writing activity in the library!
We called it The Day the Crayons Got Back to Work! :)





Lester's Dreadful Sweaters by K.G. Campbell


This is the last week to read the 2014 Bluebonnet books. I'm conducting the voting...but not until AFTER I read this little gem to the kiddos.


[Cover]Doesn't he look dreadful? I think in everyone's lifetime they may receive one dreadful something or other to be worn in public and have utter humiliation ensue as a result.That is exactly what happen to Lester.
I loved that I was able to add a little lesson on alliteration while reading this book. For instance, it all began as "Cousin Clara's cottage was consumed by a crocodile!"

After reading the book, I had the kids make a pom pom bookmark out of yarn. They loved it! Good old Pinterest gave me the idea and with a few tweaks 3rd-5th grade were able to accomplish the bookmark rather smoothly. I basically gave them a bucket of yarn and some scissors and they got after it!