Crafting with Little Kids: Recycled crayons

This is a great craft project to make at the beginning of a school year when new crayons are on sale. I found boxes of 24 Crayola crayons for sale at Target from $.20 to $.40 during back to school sales. Personally, I prefer Crayola brand crayons for this project because they melt nicely (no affiliation!) This is also a good way to clean out your child's crayon box filled with broken crayons and recycle them into new shapes. When my son was turning two, I made these crayons to give out as favors for his birthday party. Now that he is almost four, he is old enough to help with most of this project.

Materials:

• silicon cupcake molds or standard cupcake baking pan with paper liners
• crayons....we used about two boxes of 24 each plus some broken ones from our crayon box
• oven (a toaster oven is great for this!)
• small sharp knife or X-acto knife
• wood toothpick or skewer

Directions:

To make new crayons out of old ones you need not just crayons, but a shaped pan to melt them. I purchased a silicon star-shaped cupcake pan at the craft store that I only use for this project, since the crayon wax does stain the silicon. I have seen directions for this project online that used standard tin cupcake pans and paper liners, but I personally haven't tried that method. I liked the star shaped ones as they give the new crayons five points and are chunky enough to allow even toddlers to grip them well. (An alternative method for this project would be to melt each color in a container individually and pour the melted crayon wax into a candy mold or ice cube mold to set, but to me that is not a kid-friendly craft because of the abundance of handling hot wax.)

To start, we set out the crayons we wanted to use for melting. The most time consuming part of the project seems to be removing the paper labels. Crayola uses corn starch and water as glue for their labels. It really sticks well! If you have kids with nimble fingers who like to peel off the paper, they will love this part of the project. To speed things up, I used a sharp pairing knife to carefully score the paper on the crayon and peel off the wrapper. I put all of the "naked" crayons in a container. While I was removing labels, my son broke up all of the crayons into smaller pieces and sorted the colors into the mold in the color combinations he wanted. He really enjoys sorting items, so this was a lot of fun for him. It's important to not overfill the molds and to make sure there are no crayons sticking out the top, as they will melt and overflow into your oven. (To make rainbow crayons, mix up the colors a bit in each mold. Once melted, the adult can swirl the colors together a bit with a toothpick.) Each mold used about four crayons.

This next step is for adults only, or older kids who are allowed to use the oven. Once the molds are filled, preheat your oven or toaster oven to 250 to 275 degrees F. I used 250 degrees, but the wax will melt faster at 275. I used a piece of aluminum foil under my silicon tray in case of drips of stray wax. It took about 20 minutes for the wax to completely melt at 250 degrees F, but that can vary depending upon your oven and how long you preheated it. Be sure to set a timer at five to ten minute intervals to check on the wax. (You can use a wood toothpick or skewer to poke at the wax to see if it's melted through.)

Once it it melted, turn off the oven and carefully remove the pan to cool. To speed up cooling, put the tray in the freezer, once it is safe enough to handle. Freezing the silicon mold for a while makes removal of the crayons really easy.

Once your new crayons are removed from the molds they are ready to be used! The rainbow combinations were the favorites here!

You can find more crafts and other adventures with a preschooler on Diane's blog, Knitting Zeal.