Open Ended Art--Crayons

This weeks Open Ended Art is crayons.

This project is something that I have wanted to do for a long time, and probably many of you have done it because I have seen it all over the internet world. But this was a first for us, and I am so glad we did it.

We used broken up pieces of crayons to make "new" crayons by melting the crayons in a mini-muffin tin to make little crayon "cakes".

The hardest part of this activity was peeling off the paper from the crayons. It was very time consuming and I had little and big kids helping to speed along the process. As we peeled and broke the crayons, we seperated them by colors. This helped when we were all deciding what color combinations to make our "new" crayons.

Everyone chose colors to make the new crayons. Some kids stuck to single hues and others wanted to mix it all up. You can see in the picture above, our muffin tins were quite full, but when they melted there was plenty of room. When we do this again, I will put more crayons into each section so the final product will be thicker.

Pop it into the oven at 225 degrees. It took our crayons about 12 minutes to completely melt. We used Crayola crayons because I read somewhere that these work the best.

After the first batch we made more using .10 cent boxes of bargain crayons from Walmart and these work just as well.

The colors melted together beautifully!

Look at those colors. Mark is trying to cool them off quickly, but we found 10 minutes in the freezer did the trick.

Looking at these lovely colors, I thought that these would make a great little birthday gift for a child to take to a party. A bag of these and a notebook would make a great gift.

They slipped right out of the tin.

The kids were amazed by how pretty they were (and so was their mother).

They got busy creating masterpieces using these little cake crayons.

Kim and Luke didn't only use them to color with. They both began building with them. Kim said she was making a flower above.

Mark broke one in half, and the color inside was just an nice as on the outside.

Laura was kind enough to make another batch with the "cheap" crayons. After watching the littles build things with the crayons, I knew we would need more.

Kimberly coloring. These crayons are great for crayon rubbings.

Luke's pyramid.

This is Open Ended Art all on its own.

The color and design are wonderful, with no help from mom!

The next Open Ended Art is mosaics using pebbles.

Make sure to check out all the Open Ended Art-Crayons activies enjoyed this week over at Teaching My Little Bookworm.