Creative Activity for Kids – How to Make Wax Crayons

If you have some leftovers of wax crayons and you’re looking for a way to recycle them, check out this creative activity for kids that shows you how to make wax crayons of different shapes and colors.

Don’t throw your leftover wax crayons, recycle them! They can be re-used in a creative activity for kids. I’ll explain in this post how to make wax crayons.

In our case, the reason why I decided to recycle our wax crayons was because I had the bad inspiration to leave them in the sun this summer. As a result we had a mass of wax crayons glued together and the kids could not play with them anymore. I was on the verge of throwing them away, when the recycling idea came to my mind. Below you can see what we did and read about our tips on how to make wax crayons.

What you need to make your own cool wax crayons:

• Leftover pieces of wax crayons (preferably in different colors)
• A knife, hammer or similar tool to cut/smash the crayons in very small pieces
• A silicon oven tray
• An oven heated at 150-180°C

How to make wax crayons – Our step by step instructions:

1. I used a knife to cut the leftover wax crayons into small pieces. You can also leave the the kids have the fun of smashing the crayons. For this you should put the wax crayons in a Ziploc bag and give them a hammer and a safe place to do the hammering.
2. We put the wax crayon pieces in a heart shaped silicon baking tray. You can use any shape you like, but I’d advice to use silicon trays as it will be easier to remove the newly made wax crayons.
3. I then put the tray in the oven and left it for 10-15 minutes until the wax was melted.
4. After this I put the tray with the melted wax in a cold place, outside on the pavement of my courtyard and out of the rain.

What are the kids learning from this creative activity of how to make wax crayons:

• The kids learned about shapes and colors, specially about mixing colors, while we were discussing together and deciding together how we’d like the wax crayons to be
• They also got an introduction to the physics of melting something at height temperature and solidifying it again at a low temperature

Before putting our new colorful crayons aside for a later coloring time, we also played a bit with them admiring the vibrant colors, counting them and making different shapes.

This is our version on how to make wax crayons. There are other techniques out there that show how to make wax crayons, but I believe that this is the least messy of all. If you want to do something else with wax crayons, you can also recycle them into wax candles.

Do you have other ideas on how to make wax crayons with kids in an easy and non-messy way?