Wow! It has been a really long time since my last post. I took on a new position this year (I am now teaching the English side of a second grade dual immersion class), and it has been pretty overwhelming. Just lately, I'm beginning to feel like I have my feet under me.
My co-teacher and I were discussing what we wanted to do for Valentine's day, and searching the internet for ideas. We are on a tight budget since we have 56 students and were thinking about how we could manage this when we had a lightbulb moment; we have tons of broken crayons! That combined with a cute idea that we found on Pretty Handy Girl's blog made the decision for us: melted crayon heart Valentines!
Ok, wait a minute! I HATE peeling crayons. It is a long, tedious, nail-breaking process. This gave me another light bulb moment: Google it! What did we do before Google came along? I found two videos on how to easily peel crayons: one that used an Exacto knife and one that used hot water. No brainer on this one - I didn't feel like cutting off any of my fingers, so I went with the hot water method, and it worked fairly well.
I filled a bowl with hot water straight from the tap, and dumped in some crayons. For some of them, the paper came off right away all on its own. Others took a little bit of rubbing once the paper became mushy. There were a few that still didn't want to come off, and I just threw those away; didn't feel like fighting with them!
Don't know why, but the Rose Art crayons float!
Once I had them peeled, I broke them into small pieces (if they weren't already).
I sprayed my tray with vegetable spray and filled the cups about halfway full with the broken bits. I then popped them in a 325 degree oven for 10 minutes. I used a silicone muffin tray, but I wouldn't recommend this! They weren't easy to get out of the tray, and I broke several of them in the process. And on the second round, it drooped and I dropped it as I was taking it out of the oven. It made a HUGE mess. On the bright side, my smoky house smelled like crayons for two days, and I love the smell of crayons! After that, I placed it on a metal cookie sheet and that solved that problem.
They don't look very pretty when they come out of the oven, but when I took them out of the tray and flipped them over, they looked very different. Make sure you let them cool completely before you take them out of the tray.
Very Picasso-esque!
I especially like this one.
Once they were all cooked, I printed the message we wanted (4 fit on a page), cut them apart, and attached the hearts. All the blogs I looked at said to attach the hearts with glue, but that didn't work for me. I ended up sticking them on with duct tape (man's go-to solution for fixing just about anything!). I think they came out pretty well even if I did leave out the space between 'el' and 'fondo.' Oh well! Nobody's perfect, right?
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