Rainbow Heart Crayons

We have a serious crayon problem around our house. There are just SO MANY of them. My girls seriously heart crayons and coloring. And, I don’t know if you have noticed, but toddlers/preschoolers are typically not very gentle with crayons. We have so many broken in half, paper discarded, random crayons! So I decided I needed to come up with a way to put them to good use.

In the process I created a math activity for the girls without realizing it. Who knew that early math skills include color knowledge, sorting, and organizing? Not this mama! Oh, and I also created a fine motor activity! It is funny how many skills can be reinforced by incredibly simple activities.

Here’s what we did with all those crayons:

The Sort

After we had gathered all the broken, sad crayons, we spent some time sorting them by color. We started with red and worked our way through the rainbow. It looked really pretty when we were done!

The Snap

I needed the broken crayons to be even smaller than they were, so I helped the girls to snap them in half. This is a serious work out for fine motor skills. Some of them were actually difficult for me to break. Our girls gave their best effort and had some success in breaking down the crayons into smaller pieces. Oh, and some of the crayons still had their paper wrappers on them. Since we didn’t need the paper for our project, removing the wrappers was another fine motor adventure!

The Bake

I had some heart shaped candy/ice cube molds I got at the Dollar Spot at Target, so we loaded up the holes with broken crayons and popped them in the oven for a few minutes (about 300F). Once the crayons melted down, I took them out and let them cool.

Our rainbow heart crayons turned out so great! If I was to do this project again, I would take toothpicks and swirl around each heart crayon while it was still warm – to get more of that marbled look.