The Day the Crayons Quit Follow-Up Story

Woohoo!  Today is the first day of our new round of Preschool Book Club, and Miss G and I are so excited!  We’ve got soooo many fun books and activities planned for the coming weeks, as do our friends from Buggy and Buddy, Sugar Aunts, Frogs Snails and Puppy Dog Tails, and Homegrown Friends.

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Our first book, The Day the Crayons Quit is such a great story.  I’m not going to lie – it was an absolute pain in the neck to get ahold of here in Kuwait and I almost gave up – but I’m so glad I didn’t.  Gracen fell in love with it the moment she first saw it and we’ve read it pretty much non-stop since.

If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s the story of a little boy named Duncan who goes to use his crayons one day and finds a stack of letters in their place. Duncan opens the letters to find that they are from his crayons.  The crayons are unhappy {which is why they’ve quit} and each one has written a letter sharing exactly how they’re feeling and what their issues are.  Amongst the problems, Beige Crayon is feeling neglected, Black Crayon is tired of just being used to outline pictures, and Blue is exhausted from extensive use.  {So funny, right?}

Grae loved the letter format of the book and after reading each one, she’d recap how the crayon was feeling and why it was feeling that way, which led to some great discussions about problem solving and feelings.

After reading our new book several times, Miss G was excited to get going on some fun follow-up activities.  In order to prepare, she broke out a brand new box of crayons and retrieved each of the colours from The Day the Crayons Quit.  Throughout the morning we experimented with a couple of fun crayon-inspired art projects, but what Miss G really wanted to do was create her own version of the story where Duncan made the crayons happy.  {This girl has such a big heart.}

So, while she enjoyed her usual quiet play time,  I quickly created a little book template mimicking the format of The Day the Crayons Quit and printed it off.

After her usual post-playtime clean-up, she was eager to get started on her very own ‘The Day the Crayons Were Happy’ version of the book.

To create it, we revisited the pages of the original book, reminded ourselves of why the particular crayon was upset, and then talked about a possible solution.

Grae did a fantastic job of coming up with simple and achievable solutions and quickly illustrated each one put into action on the pages of her printable book.

For example, since Yellow Crayon and Orange Crayon were fighting about whose job it was to colour in suns, she decided that they’d use teamwork to create suns from now on, with Yellow colouring in the centres of the suns and Orange drawing the suns’ rays.

When she was done illustrating her solution, she’d come up with a short letter to the crayon and I recorded it on the page next to her illustration.

With all of her pages were complete, I cut off the excess paper to make her book square, folded each page in half, and glued them together in a stack.

Then we covered the stack of pages with a long strip of card stock, put a strip of washi tape along the spine, and glued her cover on the front.

Miss G was so proud.

Here’s a peek at some of the pages inside…

Pretty adorable, right?

And here’s my proud little author with her two newest favourite books.  I have a feeling I know what we’ll be reading before bedtime for the next while. ☺

 

Ready to see what our Preschool Book Club friends did with this book?  Check out these awesome projects:

 

crayon shaving art  |    letter writing     |    crayon box craft    |    paper doll crayons

Want to try a little preschool book club of your own?  You can see the entire series here.