Rainbow Crayon Craft for St. Patrick's Day

You can color your own rainbows with one swipe across the paper if you have the right tools to make your very own rainbow crayon! Because this craft requires some melting of wax in a stove, parental permission is required.

I don't know any kid who doesn't have boxes of old, broken crayons, or crayons so short they are barely usable any more. Now you can make a great St. Patrick's day craft that can be used all year round by making a rainbow crayon from all of those broken and unusable crayons.

For parents, the benefit is that they don't have to buy new crayons as often, for kids, they get a great new crayon unlike any other (and each is very unique!), and for our environment, because we are reusing things we already own, and recycling them!

Gather your supplies. You will need old, broken, and stubs of crayons in your favorite rainbow colors! Now repeat after me: My best friend loves rainbows. His name is Roy G. Biv. Red Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. You are welcome to use these colors for your rainbow, or add any other color you want or have to the mix.

You will also need a muffin tin, foil muffin liners, PAM, or another non-stick cooking spray, and an oven.

Pre heat your oven to 275 to 300 degrees. Now break up all of your old crayon chunks into small (about the size of your thumb nail) pieces, and unwrap them so that there is no paper on your crayons anymore. This is very important. Line your muffin tin with your liners, and spray them with your non-stick cooking spray. If you want to keep the muffin liners as a 'wrapper' for your crayons, you can skip the non-stick spray.

Fill each muffin liner with your crayon chunks. Make sure to mix up the colors a lot so you have a good variety on all sides of the crayon.

Now let your adult supervision put the muffin tin into the oven. Unfortunately there is no set time for baking because crayons and muffin tins are different sizes. Keep an eye on your crayon muffins. When you can see that all of the crayons are melted (the top will be smooth), take your crayons out of the oven and put them into the fridge or high up.

Please wait until your crayons have completely cooled before using them. Hot wax can be... well... HOT!

Now use your new rainbow crayons to draw a rainbow, and add a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for St. Patrick's day.