The Healing Power of Crayons!

When I started teaching 6th grade thirty years ago, the math teachers across the hall usually kicked the school year off with a “My Special Number” project. If I remember correctly, the students picked a number that was “special” to them and created posters, showing how the number was present in our everyday lives, how it stood out mathematically(prime? factors? even/odd?) and, most importantly to the kids, how the number was key to their lives. What made it special to them? This assignment was not like any I had experienced in my math classes as a student. My interest was peaked and the kids were excited to connect with math through this number love! Project-based learning, although I don’t think it was called that at the time, was quite popular when I first started in the classroom. It’s relevancy has been lost in recent years as it became most important to prep for high stakes testing. I no longer hear the excitement and chatter about special numbers like I did all those years ago, and I miss it.

Sadly, math class isn’t the only place that’s changed. We don’t often create products of our learning in English classes either. I miss watching the kids make posters, dioramas, or Dinah Zykes’ inspired foldables with all the markers and colored pencils laid out on the desks. I fondly remember the sound of a child calling out to classmates, “Who’s done with the green marker? This one is running out of ink?” I miss hearing the kids notice and celebrate the hidden talents in each other as they marvel at how a classmate was so masterful in making the bubble letters for a poster title. And it was often during those work sessions, while creating, that students chatted and relaxed into the learning process. Sometimes we’d listen to music; sometimes we’d even all sing along! The absence of this most enjoyable noise in a classroom has me pondering…maybe we made a mistake when we packed up the crayons. Maybe teachers shouldn’t have given up all their “pet projects” in pursuit of higher test scores.

As I contemplate our return to a more normal post-COVID school year, I understand that integrating Social Emotional Learning activities has been recommended to help our students ease back into the classroom after enduring the uncertainty of a world-wide pandemic. This has my wheels turning because I sense an opening, an opportunity to return to a kinder, gentler way of teaching students. Under the umbrella of creating a sense of community and fostering a safe classroom environment, I may see a chance to get those crayons out of the cupboard. I have boxes and boxes of brand new crayons that students could use to make Name Tents for their desks on that first day or Word Art for our vocabulary study. There are so many ways a box of crayons can enrich learning, and I think I may have “permission” in this post-pandemic landscape of education to teach “in color!”

Now if that’s not a silver-lining, I don’t know what is!