This some of this half term, Haffydown have been thoroughly enjoying our English unit based on the much-loved story The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. Through this colourful and creative text, we’ve explored feelings, persuasion and imagination, with a few surprises along the way.
We began by using drama to step into the shoes of the crayons themselves, thinking carefully about how each character was feeling and thinking about how we could show that through our actions, tone and expression. We then moved on to inferring emotions from the text and discovering how the author helps us understand the crayons’ personalities without always telling us directly.
Next, we turned our attention to persuasive language. The children identified techniques used by the crayons to convince Duncan to change his behaviour, from flattery and exaggeration to emotional appeal. This inspired us to plan and write our own persuasive letters from the point of view of the crayons, asking Duncan to treat them more fairly.
Then something very unexpected happened… our chairs quit! When we came into class one morning, the chairs had left us a letter explaining that they were fed up with being dragged, stood on and scribbled on. To make matters worse, they refused to come back until we promised to look after them better. We had to spend the lesson sitting on the tables and floor, just like Duncan’s crayons without their box. It didn’t take long for us to realise how important our chairs really are, and our persuasive letters to the chairs were written with extra care and empathy. We made sure to use capitals, bold lettering and underlining to emphasis out writing.
Later in the unit, we made predictions about what might happen next in the story and explored how to write a counter argument to respond to someone else’s persuasion. We learned how to choose effective and appropriate language to describe and persuade, thinking about the power of words and tone. Finally, we applied all our learning to write a creative estate agent’s description of a crayon’s “home”, using rich, descriptive and persuasive vocabulary to entice potential buyers.
Our journey through The Day the Crayons Quit has been full of laughter, empathy and creativity. The children have developed their understanding of persuasive writing and character emotion, and we’ll certainly never take our chairs for granted again!
