How to Sharpen Colored Pencils

There are few things in the classroom that drive me more crazy than colored pencils. Especially back when I used to teach middle school science. Kids go through the colored pencils like crazy. They are always breaking, and then, when you try to sharpen them, they ruin pencil sharpeners.

I bought three pencil sharpeners in one year because of colored pencils.

It got so bad that I stopped letting kids sharpen any pencils using the electric pencil sharpener. I bought some cheap handheld sharpeners and made the kids use those. Unfortunately, those get dull really fast when a bunch of kids are using them. They also take way too long to use.

I had basically given up on colored pencils. I had the kids color using crayons which did not need to be sharpened. The crayons had their own issues, most importantly it was hard to get the detail kids needed using bulky crayons.

If you are reading this post you most likely googled "how to sharpen colored pencils" or something like that. I have googled that myself - many times. I couldn't find a definitive answer for that one. I kept hoping to find a special pencil sharpener designed to sharpen color pencils, but I never found anything.

Just a few weeks ago, while just messing around on the internet, I found the answer I had been looking for regarding the colored pencil situation. Someone, an artist, I think, mentioned sharpening colored pencils in an article about drawing with colored pencils.

She said that it was okay to sharpen colored pencils in an electric sharpener as long as you sharpen a graphite pencil right afterwards to clean out the pencil sharpener. Colored pencils are made using a waxy substance. When the electric pencil sharpener sharpens the colored pencils the hear causes the waxy stuff to melt a little bit. That gums up the sharpener. However, graphite acts as a lubricant and cleans the pencil sharpener, so the waxy stuff can't build up and break the sharpener.

I have been sharpening colored pencils in my electric pencil sharpener for three weeks now with no problems. I have a mid-range sharpener, it was about $30 last year, and has continued to work well in the classroom. I am teaching third grade now, so we don't have as much whole class coloring as I did when I taught science, but I still get a couple of colored pencils a day to sharpen.

When a kid asks me to sharpen a colored pencil I just make sure that I grab a couple of pencils out of our "dull pencils" jar at the same time. I sharpen the colored pencil, then two graphite pencils. It seems to be working very well.

I hope you find this post helpful. I remember how frustrated I was when I was searching to a solution to the colored pencil problem.