How to Educate and Entertain Children By Recycling Crayons

When my kids were little money was tight and I began to search for creative ways to entertain and educate them. One way I did this was to take all the littlest pieces of broken crayons and place them in an old muffin tin and set them in the sun. We live in a very warm climate in the summer. The sun would melt them slowly all day until we brought them into the air conditioned house to cool. Once they were cooled and the muffin papers were peeled off we enjoyed coloring with our flat round crayons.

My kids would begin to design special color combinations. One of my daughters would always create one crayon with a variety of blues. The other daughter would often create a crayon with a variety of greens or purples. My son would choose as wild a combination as he could find to create his crayons. Sometimes we would even have a crayon with little bits of every color.

Coloring became an adventure with these homemade creations and the masterpieces the children would draw and color brought all kinds of joy and smiles to their faces and mine. We would use big pieces of paper and trace each other in multicolored lines. We would make trees and flowers and always be surprised by the color combinations that would show up on the paper.

My kids still talk about this and ask to do it. We struggle with finding as many little pieces of crayons, but have been known to use a perfectly good box of crayons just to mix and melt them. Now it is just as interesting to make the crayons as it is to use them.

We had taken what would have been thrown away and we learned many things.

• A fun lesson in recycling.
• The science of heat melting the wax crayons.
• The matching of colors to create same colored crayons.
• The mixing of colors to create multicolored crayons.

  Here are a few suggestions to make your own recyled crayons with your kids.

  1. If you don't live in a climate where the heat from the sun is intense enough to melt the crayons you can use an oven on a low heat setting.
  2. Use an old muffin tin as sometimes the wax will seep through the liners.
  3. Experiment with different colors and qualities of crayons and see the different levels of wax and pigment. Some melt easier and mix colors with the others melting some hardly ever melt but just become set in the ones that do.

     Have fun and enjoy this inexpensive activity with your kids.