In the Heat of the Sun; Melting Crayons

We had a slew of 90+ degree days not long ago here in the NorthEast. You know, the kind of days that you swore during the middle of a cold snowy winter that you would never complain about. The kind of hot days where even the kids don’t want to go out because it’s just too hot. Yea, those kind of hot days.

Well what can you do on hot days like that to jazz them up a little bit? A little science experiment using the power of the sun is what. I’ve been wanting to try making crayons using just the heat of the sun for a long time now. The thing is, you need really hot days to do them and thankfully there just aren’t too many of those in our neck of the woods. I was as excited as the kids to see if it would work (both the two year old and the nine year old). In the end my nine year old was rather impressed. And let me tell you he’s getting a little harder to impress lately.

We started out with a box of old beat up crayons and decided for this go ’round we would just mix all the colors together and see what kind of crayons we ended up with. This was an experiment after all.

Our mold of choice? A regular old muffin pan….

Peeling all those crayons gave us something to do for quite a while. Peeling crayons is no small task.

Next we brainstormed what might be some of the hottest places we could find outside to “bake” our crayons. We finally decided on trying to hood of our car because well, it’s black, and it gets really hot there. We added some tin foil under the muffin pan to help conduct the heat. I have no idea if it really helped or not. I’m thinking not.

We put our crayons out around 11am and checked on them a couple of hours later. They were starting to melt, but not as far along as we thought they would be.

We checked on them yet another hour later and they still weren’t completely melted. It was going past 2pm now and our midday heat would soon (thankfully) be heading in the other direction. So, we brainstormed some more. Is there anywhere even hotter than the hood of the car we could put them? Maybe inside the car? It gets pretty hot in there after all. Lets see…

Yup, that worked a little too well. About 45minutes later we had crayon soup. I guess this also proves just how hot it can get inside a closed up car on a hot day.

We brought our crayons inside and let them cool. Me being rather impatient to see if we had anything we could use or had totally ruined them, I popped them in the freezer for about 10 minutes to speed up the process. That worked really well by the way. I was able to pop them out of the muffin tins very easily after that. The tops were a little too melted and came out with kind of a weird clear-ish wax (you can see what I’m talking about on the second and fourth crayons down in the photo below) but the rest of the crayon was ok. Not completely unusable at all. C thought they were pretty cool looking.

Not too bad at our first attempt of a little science experiment. Pretty impressive what we could do with the power of the sun right? Seeing as we had over melted our first batch of crayons just a bit. (and we had a slew of hot days ahead of us) We decided to do a second round. This time we tried a silicone muffin pan in a fun star shape and we put them out on our deck on top of our grill to “cook”. We also decided to stick with color themes for each crayon, blues, yellows, and reds. We kept a much closer eye on this batch of crayons and were happier with our results in the end. Incidentally. Which batch of crayons melted faster? Interestingly enough the ones in the silicon pan sitting on top of our grill did. Only 2 hours as opposed to the almost 4 hours our first batch took. The star shaped crayons are easier for little hands to hold on to too if that matters to you 🙂

This was such a fun experiment. There’s lots to do together and talk about along the way. The kids, mainly my oldest, had fun checking on the crayons every hour. We had some great hypothesizing and science discussions along the way. And of course, in the end, my youngest had some great coloring fun.

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