I love this book! I used it last year in Year 4 when the tables and chairs quit and I think it will be one of those books that I just use year on year!
This lesson was adapted from an amazing idea I saw on Facebook (I can’t find the orignal source to credit so please do let me know if you know who it was!)
This was the first time the children had been exposed to this book and what an entrance it made!
We came into the classroom one morning, only to discover that it had been taken over by some very sad and angry looking giant crayons!
The children, in pairs, walked around with a clipboard answering the questions prompts to see whether we could work out what on earth had happened. Each pair then joined up with another pair to make a group of four to share their ideas.
There are almost infinite writing outcomes you could have with a book like this but we wrote diary entries about what the crayons had been up to whilst away. (Grey Crayon had been to the zoo to check whether the grey animals were really that big. Green Crayon had gone to the Sun to check once and for all what colour it actually was. Unfortunately, Green got a bit too close to the Sun and melted). Some wonderfully creative ideas from Year 2!
We also wrote letters to the crayons from Duncan, persuading them to come back.
I think my favourite piece of work was the children writing letters from other classroom objects to explain why they had quit too. Glue was fed up of having his head squashed by the lid, Ruler was fed up of always being forgotten and being made to look at wiggly lines and Felt Tip was fed up of losing its ‘hat’ all the time!
A book for every year group! How have / would you use it?
The Anatomy of Teaching 