Do have lots of broken crayons at home that your children aren’t using? Here’s a fun experiment to help with recycling them into new reusable, fun crayons!

We have been collecting broken crayons in our home for several months now and I wanted to find some ways to use them up. So, we decided to use some to make our own crayons!

What you need:

• Broken, unwrapped crayons
• A dedicated mold specifically used for non-edible products – we used a rubber mold meant for candy
• Oven

How to make them:

• Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Break up the crayons and fill the molds with the broken crayons. Mix and match colors in the molds to make some color changing crayons!
• Place the mold in the oven (I put on top of a pan).
• Wait for the crayons to melt, then remove the mold.
• Wait for the crayons to harden.
• Remove them from the mold and begin using them.

Where’s the science?

Crayons are made out of pigments and paraffin wax. When heated, the wax reaches its melting point and melts. The crayons melt into the new shape of the mold! As the wax cools, it hardens into a new crayon shape! (You can also make crayon candles!)

I hope that you enjoy this experiment as much as we did! These make great school gifts, by the way! We’ve made these before and given them out as Valentines gifts for my child’s preschool class!

If you want to know more history on the making of Crayola crayons, check out my Reading STEMs Learning book review on “The Crayon Man”!

-Kristen