A few weeks ago, I posted a few Instagram stories about our girls recycling their old crayons to make crayon “letters” to give to cousins and friends as gifts, and I had TONS of questions about how to do this and requests for instructions! So, here you go — instructions on how to make DIY recycled crayon “letters!”
Okay, do you have thousands of old, used, broken crayons laying around? Would you love to involve your children in creating inexpensive gifts that will actually get used for family and friends? Do you love ideas that help to occupy your children happily for a few hours (while also having many hidden benefits that I’ll talk about later)? Then DIY recycled crayon “letters” are the perfect solution! These are cheap, incredibly easy to make, and extremely fun to use!
Materials (affiliate links used):
- old crayons (any brand will do, but know they all seem to melt at different temperatures and times, so if you have a mix, then the melting stage will require more close observation)
- silicone alphabet baking mold
- baking sheet
- oven
- oven mitts
- adult supervision
Steps:
- Preheat oven to 200°F.
- Place silicone alphabet mold on a baking sheet (for stability).
- Peel wrappers off of crayons.
- Break crayons into small enough pieces to fit into desired silicone letter molds. You might want to gift someone a whole alphabet of crayons, or you might want to pick and choose which letters are needed to create someone’s name.
- Continue until desired letters are filled to the top.
- Place baking sheet and silicone molds into preheated oven.
- Bake at 200°F for 10 minutes. Check melted-ness and continue cooking if necessary. After 15 minutes, we still had a few pieces that hadn’t melted, but a quick swirl with a toothpick mixed them in with the rest of the melted crayon wax.
- Remove from oven, cool completely, then pop out of silicone mold.
In addition to being a pretty cool gift (our 5-year-old received a set of crayons spelling her name two years ago and still cherishes the letters she has left!), involving your children in creating these has many hidden early literacy and school preparedness benefits! Your children will develop finger, hand, and shoulder strength necessary for holding a pencil and writing (peeling and breaking crayons is harder than it sounds!), as well as letter recognition. This task takes significant time, so they’re building stamina and endurance, as well as strengthening sequencing and direction-following skills, and so much more!
Are you going to give this a try this holiday season???
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