Learning with crayons…

Every now and then I’ll get all the broken crayon pieces, put them in those mini muffin tins, and melt them down to “new” circle crayons.  Sometimes, if I’m feeling like super-mom, we’ll melt the pieces down and pour them into cookie cutters so that we have “shape crayons”.  (Let me be honest…I did that once.  I probably won’t ever do it again!)

But I did find something that I thought would be fun to try…alphabet and number baking trays.  I figured it couldn’t be much harder than using a muffin tin(most letters weren’t), and it would be fun to spell things out with crayons.  You can also use them(obviously) for baking or for making ice. 

So if you want to try to make crayon letters too, here’s the low-down on how I did it.  Like I said it was pretty easy except for the letters “E” and “M” (which is kind of unfortunate because EMMiE has more than its fair share of “E”s and “M”s!).  I did learn, however, that by making them thicker(using more crayon pieces), it ultimately made it easier to pop them out with out breaking them.  I’m also thinking that the thicker crayons are going to withstand more use than the thinner ones…

So…what you’ll need is crayon bits and pieces, the alphabet baking trays, an oven and a freezer.

Start by preheating your oven to about 300 degrees. 
If you want to expedite the cooling process once the crayons come out of the oven, you’ll need to clear out some room in the freezer.

 When I was looking at these online, I wasn’t sure of the actual size. 
Here’s a quarter for comparison.

abc01

Once you have all your crayon pieces broken up, you’ll simply use them to fill in the letters, as seen here.  (You’ll notice that since I was spelling certain names, I only needed certain letters.  You could easily do the whole alphabet.)

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I found it easiest to place all three trays on one big baking sheet.  That way you won’t have to keep it quite so steady when you move it out of the oven.  It’ll be pretty sloshy by then, and the potential for mess-making is definately there!  (Um, yeah…I dropped a red one all over the bottom of my freezer.  It took FOREVER to clean it all out…learn from my mistakes, folks!)

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Then comes the hardest part to me…waiting.  Once you take them out of the oven, put them into the freezer to harden them up some.  Then take them out and let them finish cooling/hardening at room temperature.  If you try to pop them out fresh from the freezer they will be too brittle and they will break

It may take a little time and patience, but see how fun these look in the end????

abc04

 

No Responses to Learning with crayons…
  1. Allison M
    November 19, 2008 | 1:26 pm

    That’s pretty neat. I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience to do anything like that though.