Recycling Crayons

Take a Look Back Tuesday

Last month I made crayon stars in my solar oven. It was super fun. I always have a lot of crayons around because I do a lot of art. I have recycled the broken bits into cool shapes. They make great new crayons, and gifts too. 

It is easy to remold crayons. You need:

Broken crayons
Teflon candy forms or ice cube trays (we get ours at the dollar store)

An oven

You can easily peel the labels from crayons by soaking them in water for five or ten minutes. You don't want to leave washable crayons soaking much longer than though. Next, cut the crayons into small pieces. The smaller the pieces the smoother/faster the crayons will melt. I like bigger pieces to make art with. It is best to separate the colors as you cut them, but you can mix them any way you want to in the forms. I really love how the colors mix when they melt.

Fill the forms with your crayon bits. Then you can melt them in the oven. We use the warm setting for ten to twenty minutes depending on how much we want them to melt. The longer you leave it in, the more mixed the colors will be. When I make art I don't let them melt all the way so that the colors and bits can all be seen. You can put them put them in the freezer for fifteen minutes and the crayons will pop out easily. 

When I make Christmas ornaments, I add beads and a metal hook to them just before I put them in the freezer.

You can melt the crayons in the sun, oven or microwave. You just need to test to see how long you need for each way.

Fossil Hunting

Hunting for fossils isn't easy. I would like someday to go to a place where there are lots just to do it once. It is easy to make fossils. For this take a look back Tuesday, Mom found some pictures from my second grade science project.

For this project we took air dry clay and imprinted different leaves and branches into it until it was almost dry. For fun we made dino imprints too.  These kinds of fossils are called external molds. I want to do it again and add something to the mold to fill it and make a cast type fossil.

How Polluted is the Air?

For Take a Look Back Tuesday, I visted again a science experiment I did at the end of the first school semester. I love my science class because we get to do experiments almost every week and most of them are a lot of fun. I have to write more now but doing it is still fun.

For this experiment we put petroleum jelly on four pieces of paper and tied them up in four different areas. We put one on the road, it is really busy, near the pool, in the parking lot and by the trash area. We let them stay up a whole day and then counted how many particles they trapped. 

I didn't think they would catch anything but they all got dust and bugs. The funny thing is that the one by the trash was the cleanest of all and the one by the pool had the most dust on it. 

I really had fun with it. I want to do it again because the city cut down a lot of trees by my house and I can see dirt blowing around now.