Clubhouse Tale: The Life Cycle Of a Crayon

We love making crayons around here. Every crayon bit goes into a broken crayon jar and saved until we are ready to make another batch of crayons. When a Holiday moves us, we shape our "new" crayons accordingly, such as the Heart Shaped Crayons we tackled this past February. Usually though, we make 'em round.


Even when the recycled crayon breaks, back into the jar it goes, and eventually it ends up back in another crayon.

Crayons always live on around here, on and on and on.

Observe this fresh basket of round crayons, we actually color coordinated the crayon bits this time.

In this case though, these crayons made their way to the outdoor easel.


And got left behind.


On a particularly warm Arizona Spring day.

Crayon soup, anyone?

We let them harden and originally I was just going to break the pieces up and send them back to the broken crayon jar, but then I changed my mind.

The Clubhouse Kids are always a part of the crayon making process, but this time I wanted to plan a little surprise.

Plus, I may let them attempt a lot of things around here... but using a grater isn't one of them.

I'm lucky I made it through this part of the process with only minor injuries myself.

Injuries that were worth it, because the results were lovely.

The plan was to make wax paper eggs that could be perfectly displayed in our classroom windows.

I had the crayon shavings and the wax paper ready to go. Iron on standby, oval shaped stencils prepped.

The Clubhouse Kids had other plans though.

They were definitely excited to see what was inside of the eggs...

"It's crayon dust!!"

...but when I said we could try sprinkling the "crayon dust" on the wax paper to make some Easter egg art, they decided they would rather dump it out... and make their own art.

"Look, I'm drawing a snake!"

"I'm making letters!"

"When you press it like this...

...it makes a circle!!"

"I'm making a heart!"

"I can pour it back into the egg!"

On and on they went, using their fingers, hands, and the eggs to "draw" in the shavings. Pouring, sifting, making shapes, writing letters, and just making their own designs. So that's what we did. 

Sure, I had other plans. 

Sure, at this rate there was no way the morning class was going to end up with pretty little waxed paper eggs in the window by Lunch, but did that really matter? 

Nope. 

This matters...

"I caught a Rainbow!"

From a crayon, to a broken crayon, to a circle crayon, to crayon soup, to crayon shavings... to a Rainbow in the palm of an excited little hand.

Now there's a life story!

It didn't end there by the way. The Clubhouse Kids did manage to pour almost all of the shavings back into the eggs and decided we would make egg art with them tomorrow. Sounds good.

Unless, of course, we change our minds.

Catch a Rainbow... even if it's not on the lesson plan,

Ms. Liz 

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