Color Chaos? No, Color Harmony!
Story by children: Gabriel, Katie, Lillian, Marifer, Siddharth, and adults Nildania and Audrey with prompts by Deepali of Writefully Ours
Creative Inspiration: Lynn Rowe Reed’s Color Chaos
Characters:
Green = Peace
Blue = Effort
Yellow = Hope
Purple = Joy
Red-Violent = Anger to Resolution
Turquoise = Calm
Red = Love
Principal Mr Greystone
Narrator
One day, I made an announcement: “I want to be an illustrator!” My mother bought me a big box of crayons. I put them in my backpack and dashed off to school. Just inside the school I met our new substitute principal, Mr Greystone. His No’s went on and on. NO Running, NO Shouting, NO hopping, No Singing! In my classroom Mrs Peters wrote the schedule on the board. I saw that I would have to wait a long time to use my new crayons…after math, reading, testing, lunch, recess, spelling bee and science.
At lunchtime I smuggled my crayons into the cafeteria. Next to the lunch line was Mr Greystone’s new board. We tried out Marvelous Magenta, Dandelion Yellow, and Periwinkle Blue and 61 other colors. When Mr. Greystone came in, he blew his stack! Art supplies in all colors were collected for disposal, recess was canceled. We got extra spelling words.
“There will be NO more crayons, NO more markers, NO more colors of any kind!”
Meanwhile, inside the trash can, the colors started talking and bickering.”HOW WILL WE EVER GET OUT OF HERE,” said Black. “Shh..be quiet. Let’s stay hopeful as we work together to plan our escape,” said Hopeful Yellow. “Yes, we should be working together, with love, to find a way out of here.” said Red, brimming with Love for the other crayons.
Hard-working Blue had a great idea. “We can make a climbing pile from the stuff in the trash can to climb up. We can pile up crumpled paper, pens and board. It takes a lot of effort to build the trash tower, but it will be easy to climb up and get out of here,” he said.
Peaceful Green was thinking about how all the colors could come together. He said: “Let’s solve this problem by making an invention. Our invention will be a color wheel.” Red-Violet, helpful as ever in finding solutions, encouraged Green: “Indeed. We could form a color wheel together, spin it and bounce out of the garbage can,” she said.
Some colors still needed a little nudge, and Joyful Purple came to the rescue. “Let’s sign a joyful song. All our noise of bickering is giving us headaches and grumpy feeling. If we could sing together, children might hear a beautiful sound. They will come forward and discover they are coming from the trash can. Maybe they will sing with us if we are signing a song they know. How about a song about coloring? How about the song: what a wonderful world?”
That got all the crayons moving! Singing ‘what a wonderful world’ together, all the colors found their order by getting in a circle. But there was no jiggle! The color wheel was not moving. Then a big wind came and blew the lid of the garbage can over. Some colors blew up and away along with it. The lid knocked the Principal’s and he began to change his mind.
A few others were still stuck in the bottom of the can. By then all the crayons that had escaped and the children were singing together! The trapped crayons heard them and got inspired with more ideas. “Let’s draw a hole and then escape through it,” said Calm Turquoise. “Ummm…I am not so sure that will work,” said one of the primary colors. “We can try,” said Yellow.
“Or…,” began Turquoise, “We can use the pointy pencils to drill a small sign that says: ‘You are all blank without us!’ All the colors agreed. 1, 2, 3…GO! They drilled the sign, made thetrash tower, climbed it and held up the sign.
The Principal, who was rubbing his head and thinking, turned around and read the sign. As the children and the crayons continued to sing ‘What a wonderful World,’ the Principal said to himself, “My Goodness.” “Ahh!” he yelled. Then he let the remaining colors out. “Yay,” said the colors, “Now we can recolor the school!”
They covered everything in a colorful jumble. Soon the Principal realized he was not happy without the colors.” Sorry,”he said.
“Colors Matter,” said everyone together!
THE END
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