Quick Pick & Project of the Week: The Day the Crayons Quit Mural

The past week has been pretty busy with parent teacher conferences and a couple of other school meetings in the evenings. It's weeks like this that I am definitely aware of how many things parents (myself included) need to balance in order to keep things running smoothly. It reminded me that one of the reasons I started this blog is to give other people ideas on how to interact, connect, and create without too much fuss.

I also love discovering great kids books, and often create quick, easy to put together projects after we read something. This inspired me to create something new: The Quick Pick & Project of the Week. Each week I'll pick one great book and pair it with a no fuss extension project. I'll try to pick books which can be found at your library or easily bought online. Hopefully they inspire some of our readers to take a few moments, gather a couple of simple materials, and connect.

For our first one we used the book The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Dawalt and created a crayon mural.

We recently were given this great book by some family friends and already love it. Each color crayon writes a letter to young Duncan expressing their concern over how they're being used (or not used.) At the end he creates an amazing picture using all the colors in a variety of ways. We enjoy the humor of the story found in each letter and the Duncan's creative drawing at the end.

This of course inspired us to create our own crayon mural. The materials involved crayons and large, brown craft paper. (I buy it by the roll at the dollar store.)

We taped the paper to the floor and went to town. 

Just this week Little Brother has started showing an interest in coloring, so he even tried to get involved in the creating of the mural. Big Brother spent more time thinking about the small details. Later we experimented with using the flat side of a crayon to color in bigger spaces. 

In the end we were pretty pleased with how it came out. (You can tell I had a little fun and got involved in coloring too.)

I can imagine slightly older kids really spending a long time with this. How cool would it be on a rainy Saturday to spread the whole roll of paper out and let kids work on it all day?

I'd love to hear what you think. Is this something you could see yourself doing with your own kiddos?