Unique Crayons for Unique Students

I have loved my experience in the second grade classroom this semester! I have spent a lot of time with the students, cooperating teacher, and student teachers, and I feel so fortunate to have been able to be a part of such a loving classroom environment! So, of course, I had to make something special and unique for the second graders before I left! I decided to "recycle" my old crayons by making brand new ones for them - each one as unique and special as each student in the classroom.

I started the process by removing the wrappers from the crayons. Anyone who has ever tried this knows that peeling the wrappers off individually creates a huge, frustrating mess of tiny papers and crayon wax stuck under your nails. So, I decided to stick the crayons in a bowl of water for a few minutes, since the water would saturate the papers and remove the glue binding them to the crayons.

This worked wonderfully for the regular Crayola crayons after about ten minutes... it did not work so wonderfully for the Crayola Washable crayons! The Washable ones should only be submerged in water for a maximum of five minutes - otherwise, the crayons themselves begin to disintegrate! They weren't kidding when they created them to come off with water... so, be careful!

Next, I used a knife to chop up the wrapper-less crayons into tiny pieces, which I placed in a mini muffin tin that had cupcakes liners already in it. Most people mix and match the different colors that they choose to use for each crayon, but I was nervous that the colors would run together in to a dark,awful mess... so I decided to group "like" colors together in order to make crayons that had different hues in them.

I put the muffin tin into the oven (preheated at 300 degrees) for about 10 minutes, and pulled them out. The colors starting meshing together and they looked really cute! Within about 5 minutes of cooling, I was able to pop the crayons out of the cupcake liners.

And here's the finished product! I decided to pair the little unique crayons with a small note for each student! I found cute polka dot cards and envelopes from the Michael's dollar bins, and printed out these little poems for each student. 

The students loved their new crayons! They loved how each crayon was different than all of the others, and they all told me that they looked like little Reese's Peanut Butter cups due to the cupcake liner impressions all around them. I saw them coloring with their new crayons a few times throughout the morning, and I was so happy that they enjoyed them!