Wax Crayons...

I love the randomness of home education.

Whilst the kids where colouring in their pictures for our Olympic themed Lapbook Oliver asked how are Wax Crayons made, so we took a quick break and watched a you tube video on how wax crayons are made, whilst the video was playing he asked how do they get the paper on, which followed on quite nicely.

This is an old video and great for the basics.

This is a modern one and goes more into depth.BBC LEARNING ZONE

I love the fact that Google and Youtube are always there if you need a demonstrable resource.

As wax crayons are one of our favourite tools to use at the minute with a lot of things we do, my nerdy personality also came out and I looked up the history of wax crayons to stick in my bank of useless bits of knowledge and this is what I came up with along with finding out that people really do actually collect wax crayons... The History Of Wax Crayons.

I may even start a section of nerdy useless bits of knowledge....

I found some good exercises for us to do in making our own wax crayons from here

Our wax crayon experiment didn't go as planned, but it was a great exercise to do it in future with the broken wax crayons, rather than throwing them away we will keep them and store them up to use instead of wasting them.

Firstly we took off all the paper.

Then we put them all into a bowl to melt them

(Which was mistake number 1, we should have put them straight into the moulds).

We then put them in the microwave to melt

Once they had melted down we poured it into the moulds.

As you can see the mixture went black, hence why I think it would be a good idea to melt them into the moulds, where they would keep their colour which they lose while pouring into the moulds.
Our other problem was we where short on moulds, so we will buy some moulds this week.

 I believe ice cube moulds of different shapes would be good for this as they would be flexible to pop out because as you can see the crayons snapped as we took them out, which could also be attributed to leaving them in the freezer too long.

All in all it was a good exercise and we will do it again to save throwing crayons away, its a great way to economise on wax crayons and hopefully next time we will have some colourful ones to do some drawing with.

But it was a good extension to our mixing colour lessons as they could see the change of colour.