Earth Day

Earth Day is such a wonderful day to celebrate our EARTH! It is so very important to teach our students to love the spaces we inhabit (including the classroom, playground, and cafeteria- am I right??).

This year I decided to make those sweet little melted crayon hearts. I wanted to share the quote “even broken crayons still color” to teach the importance of recycling and reusing items we thought weren’t useable just because they are “ugly”. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE ME SOME BRAND NEW SHARP CRAYONS, but broken crayons STILL color.

I can’t believe I’ve never made these before! They were so simple.

First, find your broken crayons and make sure they are peeled. I had some little helpers peeling away for me and they loved it.

Next, I sorted them into colors. I wanted specific colors in each little crayons heart I made.

After that, I stuck them in a big ziplock bag, grabbed a hammer and broke those crayons a part! Great stress relief, HA. Note: don’t smash them too much, just enough to get them into the mold.

Then I put them in the heart-shaped mold with the color patterns I liked. You can get the silicon mold here. I put my mold onto a cookie sheet because it’s flimsy and I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull melted crayons out of the oven without dripping them everywhere.

I set the oven for 200 degrees. Once it was ready, I popped my crayons into the oven for 10 minutes (at the end I turned it up a bit). Make sure they are melted enough, but if they get too mixed up, you’ll have a nice brown crayon. If you need to, you can take a tooth pick and swirl the colors around a bit. The tops looked a little more mixed than I wanted, but when I popped them out later, the underneath was PERFECT.

After you take them out of the oven, I let them cool for a few minutes. Then I stuck them in the freezer for 10 minutes (just the mold, not the cookie sheet, but if you have room for the cookie sheet you could throw that in there too).

These molds are great, you can just pop the crayons right out and they are ready to go!

Are these not gorgeous?? I was just dying about how perfect they came out! Look at those heart-shaped earths for earth day!

Last I used a glue gun to glue them onto these little cards I printed on card stock. You can also use tape.

Want this freebie? Click HERE to snag it in color or bw. I hope you enjoy them! I can’t wait to send them home with my students on Earth Day.

Some great books to open this earth day lesson would be The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home! Both fun reads about the crayons’ opinions on being used. This leads into a great activity for writing friendly letters too.

You can also celebrate the Earth and reinforce some of your phonics sound/spelling patterns with these color by sound pages.

You can also check out my list of Earth Day books here!

Lastly, here’s a project I came across of someone creating something from used, broken crayons (HERE), it’s pretty amazing what they are doing. It’s called the Crayon Initiative. People can send broken crayons to them and they melt them down and remold them into new crayons that they donate to children hospitals. Maybe your school is interested!

Happy Earth Day!

Need more spring ideas? Check out my Pinterest board!

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