Cooking crayons!

It seemed to me that I was buying crayons every week. The cover paper would get peeled off and they'd end up broken into a million pieces. And for some reason I've never witnessed the process but became aware of the results. And since the girls love to draw I had to get another box, and another, and another. Then I decided to buy the other type, "The twistables". If I had that kind of crayons to draw with when I was a kid, I'd cherish them, take extremely good care of them, maybe not even use them TOO much so that they last longer. But my girls seem not to get the idea of taking care of things just yet. "The twistables" were twisted to the extend that there were no more twisting!

Then I decided to try markers. First I made a mistake by overlooking a "washable" versus "non washable" part. That was bad and hilarious at the same time! Ivana drew polka dots all over her legs and announced that she had chicken pox. And Leona was fascinated with the dark colors and painted her hands and arms black and said that she was a zebra. Then I went and got the "washable" kind. And now half of them do not write because they forget to put the caps back on and I sometimes don't remember to check the box.

For a while I was giving them only regular pens or pencils, but the colors are not the same and the interest to draw and experiment with shapes and colors was easily lost. I decided to let them use the water and acrylic paints, but they can only use them on the kitchen table and when I am around. So no freedom to paint whenever they felt like, not good again.

Finally, I've stumbled upon this great idea of how to reuse the broken crayons and thought it was an exciting project to do with the girls. I had all the help I needed to peel the paper off, they were actually racing who was going to peel more caryons! I cut them into small pieces and the we separeted them according to the colors, warm and cold. Ivana and Leona had a blast arranging the crayon bits into the cookie tins and they were very curious to see them baking in the oven. At 150F for 15-20 minutes and we had our homemade crayons! We waited for them to cool and had so much fun trying to color using them.

Now since we've been spending a lot of time outside, the girls started experimenting with the sidewalk chalk. Just using the dry chalk is only a small fraction of all the things possible to do with it! Have you tried to draw with a wet chalk, fo example? The colors are so much brighter! Or how about trying dipping the chalk into the bubble solution and then drawing with it? Have you tried mixing the wet chalk with the wet dirt and see what color you can come up with? Then making a "mini pool" of all the chalk you once had, some dirt, water, bubble solution and ... get ready!... put your hands into the (what's the more appropriate word here?) "muddy mess" of an unidentifiable, murky color and make hand prints all over the sidewalk!

They've been busy for quite some time and I got to finish reading "Learning all the time" by John Holt. Learning all the time, indeed!