Harold and The Purple Crayon Project

The faculty at Explorer Elementary chose three books for the entire school to read. These school-wide books are designed to generate community building activities, giving the children and adults at the school opportunities to read and interpret a common set of texts. The books we chose are Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson, Spoon, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Scott Magoon, and The Three Questions, [based on a story by Leo Tolstoy], by John J. Muth.

In 1955, Crocket Johnson wrote the book, Harold And The Purple Crayon, about a little boy who goes on an adventure of his own creation, drawing his world with a purple crayon as he goes. Students at Explorer Elementary took up their own purple crayons to see how far their imaginations could take them as a community. A large roll of butcher paper was set up on a mural machine and each child in the school added to the story using simple line drawings. The children were prompted to look at the drawings that came before their sections of the mural and to draw what might come next in the story. The entire process was filmed using stop action methods in which one second clips were taken every thirty seconds. The video has become the lasting artifact of this project and was shown to the students at an all school Gathering.