DIY Crayons
We made these for our home school Art class today. After discussing primary and secondary colors with my five and six year old, we proceeded to break apart crayons (if they weren’t already broken) and bake them into these cool multi-colored crayons. They can be given as ‘treat bag gifts’ at birthday parties or use as really cool all-in-one crayons.
The kids loved how they looked so different after they melted and came out of the oven to cool. Then, they looked different after they cooled. We were learning about mass and mixtures in Science class today, so that worked well in this Art lesson as well.
Get your printable directions here
Get your supplies
- Gather all your broken crayons or use an extra box of crayons. You’ll need about 20 crayons for each child.
- Muffin tins (we used 6 for each child)
- Muffin liners
While you’re removing the paper from the crayons, set the oven to 200 degrees so it can get warmed up. We used 20 crayons for each child and they had fun removing the wrappers. It became a competition to see who could remove them the fastest.
Put muffin liners in the muffin tins. My son chose all blue liners and my daughter wanted the yellow liners. That also made it easier to see who the crayons belonged to after they were removed from the oven.
Fill the muffin tins with crayons. The ones on the left were my son’s and he wanted to see how they turned out if some had more crayons than others. He learned that the ones that had more crayons came out thicker, whereas the ones with just a few crayons came out thinner. My daughter decided on the ‘let’s make them all the same size, but let’s put lots of pink in them’ method.
We put them in the 200 degree oven for 20 minutes. My son’s needed to stay in a few minutes longer because of that one tin with loads of crayons. I removed them and then placed them on the stove to cool.
After about 15-20 minutes, this is what they looked like. They were cooled off and solid. I handed each child their cooled muffin tin and they removed the muffin liners from the new crayons. They loved the colors in them and how some of the colors actually mixed with other colors to create new colors.
These were my son’s final crayons and the one’s at the top of the post are my daughter’s crayons. I love them all and we’ll definitely be making more of these with all of their broken crayons. I want to try shapes next time, maybe some heart or star shaped tins.
Get your printable directions here
Have you tried to make DIY Crayons? They are super easy to make and my kids had so much fun and didn’t realize that they were learning and creating at the same time. I love those moments.
