Teaching art, as anyone knows, can be a difficult challenge. Finding quality art products that will last and fit a budget… that takes a miracle. When it comes to pastels the Crayola Oil Pastels Class Pack are not only great value for your money, they are extremely durable and are great for beginners using pastels especially in the lower grades.
What I really want to talk about is why this is the best choice of pastel to use for first timers. To begin, the oil content of these pastels is a lot lower than those of higher quality such as Pentel Pastels. As a result, you have a much more durable pastel that wont melt away into the paper, as this will become costly replacing good high quality oil pastels. So for beginners learning how to apply the correct amount of pressure Crayola Pastels are excellent as they are much more harder. The worst case is they will snap in half.
Continuing along the lines of having less oil content, this pastels are a lot less likely to stain or get into the clothes of your students especially if you do not have any coverings to go over their clothes for art. This would also be the case if you have a few students who you fear might try and draw on other students or objects. As a result, these pastels are great in these types of scenarios. In my class I do have higher quality pastels. However, when introducing pastels I always being with my crayola, and tell the students they have to show me they can be trust worthy with these ones first and demonstrate they understand how to use the pastels before moving on to my Pentels.
Next, these pastels are much wide and thicker, with edged sides. I find this to be very important because better pastels are usually smaller, rounded and require more fine motor movement. So in this case this allows all students to get a nice firm pencil grip, making drawing easier to start. Obviously anyone with any type of pencil grip difficulties this will be extremely helpful for them to start off using. As mentioned earlier this will help them also to learn how to apply the correct pressure with a larger pastel before moving on to better and smaller pastels.
As mentioned the durability of these pastels definitely make buying them worthwhile. While I still go over how to treat art supplies and materials properly with my students, things will always break and get wrecked. With this pastels students can certainly be a bit rougher with them with very little consequence. The only thing I have witnessed are the pastels snapping in half when they are treated rather poorly, however, it is still very usable afterwards. The only real artistic draw back in terms of pastels is that the Crayola pastels do not blend as well or easily together as your higher end ones do.
Overall, this is an excellent product for any classroom, especially for lower grades and ages. It is a great product to also have students prove themselves they are ready to use higher end pastels by the way they care for them and use them in class.
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