InterACTIVE Activities for The Day the Crayons Quit
The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home are two classroom essentials! @TheMerrillsEDU share interACTIVE activities featuring: Google Jamboard, Novel Effect, Chatterpix Kids, Flipgrid and more!
The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home are two essential books required for any classroom. With giggle-inducing text from Drew Daywalt and bold and bright illustrations from Oliver Jeffers, The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home are two perfect additions to any classroom library. If you’re a fan of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Sciezka and Lane Smith, then this book is for you!
If these books are in your plans, you can easily transform any classroom Crayons activity to make it interACTIVE! Learn how below!
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Adding Sound Effects While You Read with Novel Effect
Novel Effect is an app that adds a little magic to books you know and love. Read aloud with your favorite print books and this free, award-winning app follows along playing music, sound effects, and character voices at just the right moment. There are lots of titles in the Novel Effect library, including The Day the Crayons Quit. Furthermore, you can also find the Spanish translation, El Dia Que Los Crayones Renunciaron.
Purchase The Day the Crayons Quit here
Download the Novel Effect app for iOS here
Download the Novel Effect app on Google Play here
Download The Day the Crayons Quit on Novel Effect here
Download El Dia Que Los Crayones Renunciaron on Novel Effect here
Animating Crayons with
Chatterpix Kids
Chatterpix Kids is an app that allows you to bring anything to life! Simply take any photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice. Then share your video onto a platform like Flipgrid or Seesaw. Getting started is easy, just follow these steps to get started:
Download the Chatterpix Kids app
Open Chatterpix Kids, then tap on “Take Photo”
Using the camera built into the Chatterpix Kids app, snap a photo of a crayon (or any other image) by tapping the orange camera button
Next, tap and hold your finger on the screen and then drag your finger across the screen to make a mouth on the image.
If you don’t like where the mouth is positioned, you can reposition it as you see fit.
Once you’re happy with where the mouth is, click on the red microphone icon to begin recording (tip: you will want to teach your students that they will need to be prepared with what they will say in their video. They only have 30 seconds!)
After you have recorded the audio, click the green play button to see how everything looks. If you’re happy with the way it is, click the orange Next button on the top right. If you’d like to re-record the audio, you can do so by tapping the red microphone.
(Optional) You can add filters, stickers, frames and text. Once you’re satisfied, tap the orange Next button on the top right.
To save your video, tap on the Export button located on the bottom right. Tapping this will save the video to your devices camera roll.
Google’s new Jamboard is a collaborative digital whiteboard. Students can work as a whole group, or assignments can be shared individually. In this activity, you’ll find a board that looks like it is just blank / black. Students will use the eraser tool to erase the black from the board. Doing so will reveal a rainbow color! Students can erase in the shape of a crayon and make their own crayon color. Have them name their color, then click download the frame as an image. To do so, click the three dots in the top right. Then select, “Save frame as image.” This file may then be uploaded to places like Seesaw or Flipgrid to share out accordingly!
Opinion Writing with Flipgrid
Generally, teachers think of Flipgrid as the destination that houses student learning and their content. However, Flipgrid can also be used to launch ideas, spark new ones and take learning to a whole new level. For example, after reading The Day the Crayons Quit, have your students think about which crayon they feel is overworked. Then, have them brainstorm several ideas that back their opinion on a sheet of paper. Next, instruct the students to log onto Flipgrid and explain which color is most tired and why (listing the ideas from the paper). After they have finished, they can watch their classmates’ responses to see how they feel - and possibly pick up some new ideas (or change their mind all together). Students can take this information and create / publish a writing piece that ties into the The Day the Crayons Quit!
Fun with Flipgrid Photo Stickers
If you’re in a hurry and want to hear which crayon your students think is the most overworked, they can do so quickly by explaining their thinking and using our Flipgrid Photo Sticker (see below). This frame may also be used to retell the sequence of events, or compare / contrast both stories.
Click here or below to download our free
Flipgrid Photo Sticker
Adding Augmented Reality to the Crayons series
This is a great activity if your students are learning about describing characters, making connections or comparing / contrasting characters. Start off by reading The Day the Crayons Quit or The Day the Crayons Came Home. After you read, revisit each crayon and think about how you would describe each one. We recommend using something like a bubble map to help organize student thoughts on each crayon. Once the class is ready to move on, have the students log onto Flipgrid. Give the students time to record a video where they describe the first character.
After they have submitted the first character, instruct them to view their own video. Once they are logged on watching their own video, have the students add a video comment to themselves describing the next character. Students will repeat this step as many times as necessary to describe all of the characters your class has discussed. Doing so will create an organize thread where only that particular student’s videos will be posted (other classmates will not respond to each other - yet 😜).
Now that you have all student responses, it’s time to take things to the next level! Have your students work on cutting out the trading cards resource (see image or click here to download). While they are cutting them, take a moment to print / download the Flipgrid video response QR codes. This can be done quickly from a topic on the educators dashboard and clicking the open square (next to “Actions”), selecting the appropriate videos (or select all) and then clicking “Print QR Codes.” Tip: These QR codes may be resized in a program like PowerPoint or Google Slides. You will want to resize the QR codes a bit for the next part.
Now that you have the QR codes printed, give each student their QR codes to cut out. The QR codes then get glued to the Trading Card template. Students can illustrate the back of the cards with the appropriate crayon they are referring to. Now, with the QR code printed on the card - have the students open the Flipgrid app (mobile devices only). Instead of logging onto their Group, instruct the students to tap the orange / red “Scan Flipgrid QR” button. This launches Flipgrid’s QR code reader. Students are now able to scan their trading card QR codes with the Flipgrid app. The best part - their responses will open in augmented reality! Now that the cards are completed, it’s time to trade them! Students can now scan the code(s), watch the video(s) and respond to one another accordingly - or just trade with each other for fun. See how this all works in our video below!
More lesson ideas tied to the Crayons series
Here are some other ideas you can tie into the Crayons series:
The Power of Protest: Explain the meaning of a peaceful protest (as in The Day the Crayons Quit). Then, have students create a protest poster / flyer (it can be paper sized) for the crayon that they feel is the most overworked. Share their poster / flyer on Flipgrid, then have the students watch each other’s videos. Lastly, poll the students one last time to see if anyone’s opinion has changed after watching their friends.
Persuasive Letters: Have your students pick a crayon and then pretend that they are the character that they have picked. As the crayon, write a letter to the rest of the class explaining why you feel as though you are overworked, or why your vacation was the best. Then, share the letter on Flipgrid.
Science Integration: Collect all the old crayons from the classroom. Then, use a hair dryer to experiment with melting the crayons. Do new colors form when melting them together? Student hypothesis can be recorded and shared in Flipgrid!
Color Spectrum: Discuss the way light reflects and the color spectrum. How does this help when manufacturers are making crayon colors?
Inquiry Learning with Wonderopolis: Have you ever wondered where crayons were first made? Or maybe what the first crayon color was in the United States? Read this Wonderopolis article to tie in some history!
Planning a Day the Crayons Quit lesson or unit? Download our slide templates below!
-- Please follow us on social media and tag us with how you’re using The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home into your classroom! 👓👗
For more tips, tricks and lesson ideas for making learning more interACTIVE, check out our books The InterACTIVE Class and Flipgrid in the InterACTIVE Class on Amazon!
AR Flipgrid Trading Cards
Describing the characters from a text has never been this fun! Check out how to create your own augmented reality character trading cards!
Describing characters has never been this much fun! Joe’s first graders spent some time going through a text, creating trading cards for each character, and then adding an AR (augmented reality) flare to it all.
Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers’ “The Day the Crayons Quit” has become a loved book amongst teachers, parents, and students. In this highly entertaining book, the crayons write letters to a young boy named Duncan, as they are fed up with how they are being treated. To make the read aloud interACTIVE, you can download the Novel Effect app. This app uses the microphone built into your smart phone to listen as you read. When you read certain words along the way, sound effects and music is played.
After reading, we moved on to describing the characters. We did this by using a Bubble Map, which includes only adjectives. We revisited each character, creating a trading card for each.
Next, we used the app Chatterpix Kids to “animate” the illustrations, which later became the AR videos. Chatterpix Kids is a primary friendly (but fun for all ages) app that allows you to draw a mouth over a still image, and give it the appearance that it is talking. We repeated this process for each of the characters.
After we recorded on Chatterpix, we exported the files and saved them to the device’s camera roll. From there, we “app smashed,” or uploaded, the videos into Flipgrid. Each student submitted an initial response, but then they responded to themselves. Once completed, we printed out each video response’s QR code. This code was then glued to the trading cards. When scanned with the Flipgrid QR code reader, it will open in AR!
I also gave the students the opportunity to illustrate the back of the cards. As an added bonus, I had the students “level” the characters based on how much they thought the crayons effected Dunkin’s thinking. We’ve been working with tens and ones in math recently, so this fit right in! Each student “leveled” the characters on a scale from 10-100, with a 100 being the character that has the biggest impact. Once the activity was completed, we added up the total of the lvels for a grand total. Check out the entire video tutorial below!
Interested in trying this out in your classroom?
Here’s all the resources you need:
The Day the Crayons Quit book
Novel Effect app
Trading Card Template
Chatterpix Kids app
Flipgrid app
Be sure to tag us on social media! We’d love to see how you’re using this in your classroom!
For more #interACTIVE lesson ideas using Flipgrid, check out our book The InterACTIVE Class on Amazon!
