Painting With Crayons

"He has filled them with skill to do every sort of work done by an engraver or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of workman or skilled designer."

Exodus 35:35

I found this activity as I was researching other homeschooling blogs looking for fine motor and sensory table activities. (I wish I could remember which blog or find it.  I would share the link and give that mom credit!)   I wanted to share what we did in our house and how our experience with painting with crayons turned out!  It is a fairly simple activity which provides so much for your preschooler or special needs child that would enjoy additional textures on paintings.

What you need:

a stove

crayons

Q-tips

cupcake/muffin tin

cupcake liners

construction paper

What you do:

*First, you need to collect any broken crayons you might have and peel the paper off.  If you want to use new crayons, just break them into pieces and peel the paper off.  Please know that peeling the paper off is very time consuming, so don't wait until right before you start the activity to do the peeling.  (Like I did.)  Or you might have to postpone it until another time....

*Second, you fill the cupcake/muffin tin with the liners. Then add the broken up crayons. I divided each color into their own separate try. You might add some different colors together for creating a fun swirly color. It is going to be fun and swirly anyway, but it still would be neat to try.

*For the next part, you can choose how you want to complete this step. You need to heat the crayons so they completely melt. You can turn a burner on the top of the stove. I would recommend using the back burner. Or, you can heat them in the oven. The oven will heat them all at once. Once they were heated, I took the liners with the melted crayon out, and put them on a paper plate. I rotated colors back and forth between the table and reheating to keep the project going. 

*After the crayons are melted, you can paint! We chose a variety of colors of construction paper. I think the black turned out the best. I tried to have the children use a different q-tip for each color they chose to paint with. That way there was not too much mixing of the colors.

When the paint dries, it provides a really neat texture.  It goes back to a broken up crayon texture, but still looks like paint.  My children really enjoyed it!  I hope yours will too!

 Next step:  Display!!!!