A Question Book lesson

Question books have been a fun way to answer the many questions of my children. A while ago Columbo added to his book “What are crayons made of?” With a little online research I was excited to make a lesson of his question.

While encouraging the littles to use the question books for those random questions of how something works or how it’s made, I do not expect perfect penmanship or spelling. I was so amused that Columbo made his own corrections when realizing he’d made spelling errors, that I had to share a picture.

We started our crayon project with a couple of videos. Good old Sesame Street was Little Bears favorite, but did not answer the question. I had found a video on Crayola.com, but it’s no longer there. I did find a fun video on how crayons are made, but it was not specific about what they were made of. As I was searching youtube.com for what we’d watched before, I found a how it’s made video that did answer the question.

Once we knew what crayons were made of, we decided to make our own…well, sort of. We went through our crayons for broken pieces, and removed any wrappers.

We piled the broken crayons in an old muffin pan, and melted them in a 250 degree oven. It took about 30 minutes in our larger pan.

The littles enjoyed watching the process.

Once the crayons were melted we let them sit until they were cool and hardened. This took quite a while and I even put them in the refrigerator for a while. The results were wonderful. We had hockey puck like crayons. Not exactly the easiest shape to color with, but that didn’t stop us.

The littles absolutely love hands on learning, so this was a great lesson. I’m concerned I’m going to be challenged now that Magoo has his own question book. His first entry is “how is ice cream made?” I’m pretty sure he’s hoping for some hands on learning that involves taste testing.