Kids Wednesday: Making Your Own Crayons Science Experiment

We went to a science program at the library where the "mad scientist" did experiments and showed the kids but there wasn't anything hands on.  My son was eager to do something himself at home so I decided to do the one that has been on my list for a long time- melting crayons in the sun.

We started by getting a bunch of broken crayons that we had in our crayon bin and peeling the paper off of them so that they were clean wax. Then, we filled the disposable muffin tin that my mom gave me with the broken pieces.  We broke down a few to get a little more in the small muffin tins.  We did this at night because we were just sitting watching a little television and I figured that it was a good time so we would be ready to go in the morning.

 We put the top on the tin and left it for the next morning to put outside.  I thought this was the greatest thing because that meant that bugs and other things couldn't get into the crayons as they melted. The additional bonus is that it kept my son out so that he could just observe.  My son wanted to check on the crayons every few minutes in the beginning so I planned this for a day that we would be busy and away from the house so that wouldn't continue for the whole day because I didn't think that I could take the running in and out of the house.

After half of the day, we came home and they were a little squishy.  He used a Popsicle stick that we have in our art supplies to test it.  He used the stick to stir one of the crayons so we said that we would use that as the test to see what happened but I stopped him from stirring all of them because it was super sticky and messy (and made the crayon more black then anything else on the top left).

After most of the day, the crayons were getting liquid but only the dark colored crayons.  The metal container was hot to the touch so make sure to only let adults touch that part when moving back into the house to cool even though the two lightest colors were still not fully melted.

We left them to sit and harden and popped them out of the tins.  The great thing about using a disposable pan was that I could push up on the bottom to get the crayons to pop out.

We made some obervations that dark crayons melted better then the light ones because they soaked up more of the sun.  We also made some statements about how long we thought it would take and how long it actually took to melt the crayons.  My son made a drawing of part of the melting process but he wasn't pleased with the picture so he thought that talking about it to make observations were a little better. We tested the crayons on the papers.  The edge flaked off a little but the rest was great.  I used the paper to smooth off all the edges and then we moved the crayons to my son's art table so that he could use them as he wanted to make as many beautiful pictures as he wanted.

Overall, this was a big success and super frugal because it used everything we had around the house.  Hope you try this fun science and art experiment and enjoy the new crayons for yourself.