Recycled Swirl Crayons

by Carrie Wells, Ed.D.

Gather together all your broken old crayons to make this awesome project!

Materials:

• Old broken crayons
• Silicone muffin or candy pan
• Cookie sheet

Sift through all your crayons to find the broken ones.

Peel the paper off the crayons.

Break the crayons into small pieces. 

The peeling of the paper and braking of the crayons are both great fine motor exercises.

You may need to cut the crayons to get really small pieces.

We sorted our crayon pieces to make a Valentine's Day crayon and a St. Patrick's Day crayon. We filled each muffin cup about half way.

Place the silicon muffin pan on a cookie sheet. Bake at 230 degrees for about 15 - 20 minutes, or until the crayons are completely melted. Here's what they looked like when we took them out of the oven.

We let the crayons cool for about an hour and removed them from the tray. Here are our awesome recycled swirl crayons, perfect for the upcoming holidays!

   

Tissue Paper Sensory Fun!

by Carrie Wells, Ed.D.
I tend to be a hoarder when it comes to gift bags and tissue paper. Each gift bag costs $2 or $3 and a pack of tissue paper is $2 or $3, so you can literally spend $5 just wrapping a gift (not to mention the cost of a store-bought greeting card - another $3+ each). This weekend, I could no longer deal with the mess in my garage, so I started by organizing all of my 'recycled' gift wrap. I found some bags that really weren't usable, and I sorted my tissue paper by useable and garbage.

So what do you repurpose tissue paper before throwing it out? Play with it, of course! We threw it all over the floor and let Lydia dive in.

She loved all of the different colors. 

She liked crinkling it all up. 

And then she balled up a blue and a green and put them in her stroller. She walked her "baby" around the house.

She's so imaginative!