It's been four years since I bought new crayons. When I was coloring with the girls the other day, I realized that our box of crayons was very well used. Most of the crayons were broken, many were missing wrappers, none had sharp points. I decided it was time to invest in a new box of crayons.
But what to do with the old crayons? There are lots of websites with ideas for recycling old crayons. I settled on melting them into "new" crayons. It's an easy process that most of us have done before, but was nonetheless exciting for my kiddos.
If you've got a three year old, set her to work peeling crayon wrappers. It should keep her busy for most of the afternoon.
Once they're all peeled, break them into small pieces.
Then put the pieces into a muffin tin. (Don't use your good muffin tin. I picked one up at Goodwill for seventy-nine cents.) We decided to do some rainbow crayons, and also some single-color crayons. For example, we filled one tin with all different colors of blue so that when you color with it you get multi-hued blue.
Then we baked them - 300 degrees until they were all melted, about ten minutes. It happens quickly enough that Two Little Girls were content to sit and watch the wax melt.
Let them cool for awhile - it took ours about an hour - and then pop them out of the muffin tin and they're ready to use.
Nothing terribly exciting, but it entertained my girls for awhile, anyway. And the new "crayons" make for fun blocks too - Littlest One had a fantastic time seeing how high she could stack them. :-)
2 comments:
I've never tried this before, but I think I will try it this year with my preschoolers. There are literally tons of broken crayons and this would be a fun thing to do with them. Plus all the 3 year old's love to peel the wrapper off the crayons anyway...
that was such a cute photo of them watching the magic unfold.
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