Repurpose crayons into beautiful sun catchers from crayon shavings! Use crayon shavings to make Easter Egg sun catchers with this repurposed crayon activity perfect for Easter and Earth Day!
Looking for the perfect rainy day activity! Check out how to recycle those broken crayons into sun catchers using supplies you prob have on hand!
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Repurpose Crayons into Sun Catchers
If you are anything like me, you have a giant box of broken crayons in your craft supplies.
I usually just start tossing the crayon halves when the girls decide to leave them on the floor. It’s my new rule. If you leave, I throw it out.
Seriously, I have 5 kids. I don’t know what else to do to make them value their things anymore. If they truly care about it, then they’ll clean it up. Fortunately, my kids care about everything. Every. single. little. thing.
We found some time to craft. Yay! We decided to repurpose crayons to make some sun catchers.
The girls wanted to put an Easter spin on things, so we ended up turning them into Easter eggs just for kicks.
You can make sun catchers too. It’s super easy. Check out the directions for this super easy project below!
Repurposed Crayons Sun Catcher Supplies
- Various colored crayons
- Pencil sharpener with crayon sharpener opening
- Wax paper
- Iron
- Scissors (click the link to grab some of my tried and true scissors! I’ve put these scissors through it all and somehow they are still chugging along years later!)
- Paper plates (to collect your crayon shavings on)
- Decorations (optional)
How to Make Sun Catchers from Crayon Shavings
Round up some crayons. We love to repurpose crayons because we always seem to have a bucket full of broken pieces.
To begin, I let the girls pick their color stories with shades of colors for each egg.
They decided to go with Blue, Yellow, Pink, and Purple. Use the pencil sharpener to shave the crayons into a pile.
We used paper plates to limit the mess.
Please note: this is the longest part of the whole project. It’s hard for a 5-year old to do, but they can do it. I just did some deep breathing patience practices while I waited and then we talked about prisms.
After you have shaved a substantial amount for each crayon, you’ll want to heat up your iron.
While your iron is heating up, place the piles of crayon shavings onto your wax paper.
You can also just shave the crayons onto the wax paper, to begin with, but I wanted to avoid a potential mess with my 5-year old and 1-year old!
The rascally 1-year old and tiny 2-month old needed constant entertaining.
Place another sheet of wax paper over the crayon shavings. Use your iron to melt the crayon between the sheets of wax paper.
It doesn’t take a long time. We placed the iron on for 10-20 seconds and then redid some spots that looked like they needed to melt more.
DO NOT DRAG YOUR IRON OVER THE WAX PAPER. IT WILL RIP.
Draw your design with a pencil and cut it out. We drew some ovals for eggs and then cut them.
The crayon should be melted completely. If it flakes out while your cutting, place the iron on it for a few more seconds.
Remember to cover up any exposed crayon so it doesn’t get on your iron.
Cut out your designs and decorate. You can hole punch the top and add a string if you want to. We chose to add some double-sided tape and hang it on the window.
This project took an hour for us to do even with the extra two kiddos to watch. I’m super impressed that I was able to do craft time with all four kids!!
Throughout the project, we took time to talk about prisms. We learned about how light bends when it goes through a prism and that each color has its own wavelength that bends at its own angle. The girls thought this was super cool!
Easter STEAM Activities
Check out these awesome Spring and Easter STEAM activities that are the perfect way to incorporate Science, Tech, Engineering, Art, and Math into the season!
Jelly Bean Sudoku Logical Reasoning Activity for Kids
We love jelly beans, so activities that involve candy are some of our favorite! These jelly bean sudoku puzzles are great for kids of all ages. You’ll even find two different blank Sudoku grids to make your own puzzles!
Easter Egg Algorithm Art Unplugged Coding Activity
In programming algorithms are used to create solutions to problems that can be reused, like when sorting or searching for something.
This Easter egg algorithm art activity introduces basic coding skills by giving kids a set of rules and steps to follow to create unique designs for each egg!
Easter Egg Sudoku Logical Reasoning Puzzle
Sudoku is a great activity to strengthen logical reasoning skills and decomposition skills while working with a simple algorithm, or a series of instructions for solving problems.
This Easter Egg Sudoku activity is a way to introduce kids as young as preschool to the rules and the use of logical reasoning to solve a problem.
Free Printable Easter Worksheets for Kids
There may still be snow on the ground here in Wisconsin, but Spring is quickly approaching! To celebrate, here are some free Easter worksheets for kids!
These worksheets include a few different exercises for kids of different learning levels.
Toddler Rainbow Color Recognition Storybook Activity
This toddler rainbow color recognition activity is a great way to incorporate a fantastic book about colors with a tangible color recognition fine motor activity!
This activity is a great way to have some Spring, St. Patrick’s Day, or Summer fun and it reinforces color matching as well as supports fine motor skills.
Color by Hexadecimal Rainbow Coding Activity
Color-by-number activities are a great way to introduce basic coding skills by following a key code, matching pieces and patterns to create an image, and executing an algorithm or series of steps to complete the activity!
This Color by Hexadecimal Rainbow is an excellent activity to introduce hexadecimal color coding other to young kids with a recognizable and well-known object!
Preschool STEAM Easter Sequences Coding with Jelly Beans
We love jelly beans and always try out the really weird flavors just for fun, so I made these sequence coding worksheets to work on pattern recognition with my toddler who is absolutely a future engineer and kid coder!
Grab these Easter Sequences Preschool Unplugged Coding Activity worksheets to practice sequencing today and finish writing sequences with jelly beans!
Hexadecimal Color by Number Easter Eggs
Do you remember doing color-by-number activities when you were a kid? I loved following the key to color different sections of an image to reveal cool patterns or images! My kids love color-by-number activities including pixel coloring images.
This Hexadecimal Color-by-Number Easter Egg worksheet is a great introduction to how HTML color coding works and other basic coding skills!
How to Make a Recycled Plastic Water Bottle Sun Catcher
Are you ready for an awesome recycled art project that you can do with your kids?? Then you are in the right place! You can make a recycled plastic water bottle sun catcher with some plastic water bottles and permanent markers!
Finding Pi with Math Sun Catchers
The goal of this activity is to explore the number Pi and prove that it is a mathematical constant by making math sun catchers out of perler beads for a fun math + art STEAM activity!
Springtime Squeegee Painting Art Activity
Are you looking for a fun Spring craft that your kids will be crazy about??!! This Springtime squeegee butterfly art activity is the perfect way to make a Spring craft with a neat sensory experience!
Spring Logic Word Puzzle
We love to put our logical thinking to the test and work on logic puzzles! This Spring logic word puzzle activity is a way for kids to use logical thinking and pattern matching paired with spatial recognition and spelling.
Meet Toni, the Maker Mom behind Our Family Code
Hey there, I’m Toni! I’m a software engineer and Maker Mom that finds my joy in unleashing my children’s curiosity by exploring STEAM concepts with my fantastic five!
When I’m not chasing toddlers or raising tweens, you can find me tearing things up and putting them back together over here at Our Family Code.
I am the owner and content creator of multiple educational websites designed to increase access to STEAM & STEM education with a focus on teaching computer science and coding to kids of all ages!
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