Crayon Similes & the Hole to China, Part 1

During one of my teaching years, the writing of color similes led me straight into what I think of as "a digging a hole to China" experience. I would like to tell you what happened.

One September I introduced similes to my third-graders by using crayons. I found this to be a really fun and easy way to get a beginning idea of similes across. We used the 8 colors above that come in both large and regular sizes in 8-color packets of crayons (plus we added white and gray).

Then I brought as many things from home to match the colors as I could. For example, clockwise from the top left are mini-carrots, a potato, a very tiny iron skillet, two broccoli florets, one tomato, three plums, and a lemon.

In the middle is the one lonely blue crayon. I had nothing on hand today that is consistently blue to put with the blue crayon. Blue is a somewhat rare color in the natural world, isn't it?

But I want to tell you about what happened this one particular September when I did my "crayon simile" lesson with my class.

First we brainstormed for everything we could think of that was routinely thought of as red, yellow, brown, or green, etc. I wrote their ideas on the chalkboard, using colored chalk. We had two chalkboards and we filled up both of them. (This one above is a small 9 x 7 inch chalkboard that I have at home.) 

But back to my story.

I had a little girl by the name of Jewel in my class. Jewel was a little gem of a girl. She smiled all day long, jumped headfirst into any project, was always the first to raise her hand even when she didn't know the answer, and, in early September in third grade, she was not yet reading or writing, although she had perfect penmanship and could copy anything ~ letter-perfect.

In the mornings when the class wrote in their journals, Jewel drew pictures in hers.

I showed the children what I wanted them to do: to write down as many similes as they could using the words on the board or making up their own. They could write in crayon or pencil or both. They could draw pictures or cut pictures out of a stack of catalogs and old reading-readiness workbooks that I had at the back of the room.

Most of the words they might need were on the two chalkboards. Because I wanted them to learn about similes, I didn't want their fear of misspelling words to interfere. By third grade, some children are so anxious that each word they put on paper be "right" that they can't go forward with their thoughts if they are unsure of their spelling. I hope children nowadays are able to use creative spelling more easily than when I was teaching.

Jewel's paper looked something like this. Alas, when I was teaching, I sent all their papers home with them, and now I wish I had copies of their work to show you, but I don't. Still, I remember some things with a clarity that sometimes takes my breath away.

Jewel had very much taken to heart the idea that a simile must contain the words "as ______ as a _____" and that it needed a color in the first blank and an object that same color in the second blank. And she had all the words she needed on the chalkboards. She could find the word "Red" on her red crayon, and match it to the word "Red" on the chalkboard, and then find all the words beneath that were red objects. Her page was filled with similes from top to bottom.

But the next day I made it a little harder. 

I asked them to find a picture from the catalogs or workbooks and write one sentence describing the color of their chosen object with a color simile. I gave them an example, like the one above, to show them what I wanted.

There was a big flurry of finding the pictures, pasting them on their papers, and hunching over to write their sentences. The brainstorming words from the day before were still on the chalkboards.

Everyone went to work. Everyone except Jewel.

My sweet little Jewel could not make the leap from yesterday's lesson to today's assignment. Yesterday she had written a whole page of similes. Today she could not write one single simile, partly because she could not write a sentence in which to put it, but also because she could not go from the picture she had chosen of a dog to a simile about the dog.

Jewel had chosen a little brown dog for her picture.

She wrote her name and pasted on her picture and tried to start a sentence. And, bless her little heart, she tried and erased and tried and erased and tried and erased until she had dug a little hole right through her paper.

Then she cradled her little head in her little arms over her paper, in tears.

My sweet sparkling little Jewel was falling down a very deep dark hole. All the way to China.

To be continued tomorrow . . .

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