Crayon Engraving and Scratchboard "Scratch Art"-Mother's Day-lesson #5

For Ashley and Whitney’s lesson, it was for 4^th grade and called crayon engraving and scratchboard “Scratch Art”-Mother’s Day. This was a great lesson and a very fun activity! Each student started off by coloring a piece of sturdy cardstock with crayons. The teachers really emphasized how important it was to press down very hard with the crayons. After we had our whole piece of cardstock colored with crayon, we used black tempera paint and detergent mixture to coat the whole piece of cardstock and the crayon. We then let our cardstock dry as we listened to the PowerPoint the teachers had for us.

After that, we had an unscramble worksheet about Mother’s Day that we worked on. After that, we took a piece of regular paper the same size as our cardstock and folded it in half the hamburger way to create a card. We practiced drawing things on that card, to create one for our moms for Mother’s Day. After we drew our card sketches, we turned the paper over and shaded where our words/pictures were on the other side. Then, we traced over our words/pictures again with a hard pencil onto the scratchboard that had the paint on it. As long as we pressed down hard enough, you could see where our pencil marks were. We then used a sharpened wood stick to go over those pencil marks and the paint scratched off. It was so cool to see the colors from the crayon show up under the black paint. It was really pretty. We finally folded the cardstock in half hamburger style and that was our card! We also put a piece of paper glued inside the card and wrote a nice message to our moms.

An extension activity for this would be to do this project for any holiday. You can use this method to make any cards or even invitations. I think it would be cool to use as a way to make invitations for parents for a school concert, science fair, conferences, track & field day, etc!