Recycled Crayon Disks

If you have kids, you have crayons. If you have crayons, you have little pieces of broken crayons.

My son and I sat at his desk and sorted though his crayons and took out all the broken ones.  I remember doing this with my mom when I was little and thought it was so cool making my own crayons.  Now I know you can now go to the store and buy a Crayola Crayon Maker, but I don't have one so we are doing it how I remember!  I had/have a silicone muffin pan (and frankly I hate using it, it never seemed clean and just seemed like more of a hassle) so...I decided that it would be perfect for crayon making.  The mini muffin pan would probably be even better but I only have the regular so that is what we used.

 

We made adding the broken crayons to the pan like a game of sorts.  We separated them in to color categories, depending on the amount of broken pieces you could expand the categories. We had dark colors, reds and oranges, greens and blues, and yellows with white.  For some reason there were more broken yellows.  

Once they were all in the pan, I sent my son to play and I put the pan in the oven.  It was set at 350 degrees and only heated for about 10 minutes.  You just need to leave the pan in until the crayons are just melted.  Set aside to cool and harden.  Then I got my son and we took the "new" crayons out of the pan.  He first tried to take a bite of one, a little misunderstanding on his part...but I showed him and they were added with the other crayons.