Summer is officially here! It came earlier this afternoon, and I for one could not be happier. The sun is out, my roses are blooming, a warm breeze is blowing, and best of all, my kids are home with me for long stretches of unstructured time. During the school year, I spend a lot of time driving my children to school and to after-school activities. On top of that, there are homework assignments to supervise, tests to help study for, lunches and snacks to pack, clothes to lay out, baths to give, and in general a lot of real tasks that we need to fit in between the hours of "school's out" and "lights out".
But then comes summer, glorious summer, full of long sweet sunny hours when we can dive into the kinds of fun adventures that don't always seem to fit into the school-year calendar. You already know we're happily baking bread and bagels and everything else we can dream up. But maybe you didn't know we all are art lovers too. We like painting and drawing and even coloring (some of us love coloring!) and we especially like art supplies. In fact, we like them so much that we decided to try and make some of our own.
Inspired by Trish Kuffner's fabulous book The Preschoolers' Busy Book we set out to make our own crayons. Well, "make" may be too ambitious of a word, perhaps "mold" is more accurate. At any rate, this is what we did.
First, we got out the mini-muffin tin and greased it with canola oil. Then, we rounded up all our old broken crayons. Believe me, we had a lot. We peeled them, broke them into small pieces, and then dropped the pieces into the cups of the muffin tin. We set the tin in the oven at 350 degrees for 3-4 minutes. When the crayon wax melted we pulled the tin from the oven. We let the tin cool and then popped our new cool round crayons out.
And....They really work! When you color with them they make very cool varigated swirls of color on your paper. They are just the right size for little hands. And they come with great "Look what we made!" bragging rights, proudly exercised upon all visitors.
1 comment:
This is so awesome! My little girls loves breaking her crayons up so we have tons of little pieces. Now I have something to do with them, and I think she'll like the variations of color in the crayons. I wonder if you could even theme crayon rounds - like pinks, purples and reds all in one.
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