A Colorful Melting: A Useful Craft

If you are anything like me, you have long since disposed of the many many paper boxes of crayons and have resorted to something bigger to keep the many waxy colored sticks in. Mine is a plastic diaper wipe box. I am now on child numero dos and I noticed that she has been coloring with a lot of hand me downs along with a few new crayons. What do you do with the used up or broken crayons? Throw them away and just by new ones? Well don't. Enlist them into your next rainy day or snow day or try four days, boredom buster. Seriously. These also can be wrapped up into cellophane paper with a pretty little bow and be given away as a creative gift!

1. Make your kids collect all the broken crayons around the house- this can take a little while, just because you think they are all in that wipe box, they are not.

2. Sit the kids down at the table and have them start peeling the paper off of the crayons. Finally the kids get to make a mess! Or you may have a few gripers, like my dear son about how stupid he thought this was, but like any good mother I assured him we were having quality family time and if he wanted to play his iPod later he would smile and really would be surprised of the end result of this project.

3.While the kids are peeling away grab your cooking spray, any shaped silicone or baking pans you have and spray them down. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees.

4. Once all the paper is off divide the crayons by color families, i.e. reds with pinks,  browns with blacks, greens with other shades of greens, blues with turquoises. You can even try to experiment with different colors and make some rainbow crayons.

5.  Once divided place the crayons into the oven until melted. Take them out of the oven very carefully-hot liquid wax. They will harden quickly, then they will pop right out of the pans- at least they did out of my metal muffin pans! Then start coloring. They can be broke if needed!

My kids ended up thinking these new "chunky" crayons were the neatest thing ever! My daughter started coloring as soon as possible, before I could even get my camera out again. And, the fact that they could stack, well that was a double bonus of activity for our snow day!

♥Mrs. Hart♥