Pumpkin Crayons

My daughter wanted to do a fall craft today.  We looked on Pinterest for a fun activity.  The idea we found was for using old crayon pieces and melting them into heart shapes for Valentine's Day.  Since it is almost Halloween we decided to make ours into pumpkins. 

We chose to use mostly orange, yellow, green, brown, and red crayons.  We found that the older the crayons, the easier the paper wrapper came off.  We peeled as many as we needed and then broke them up into small pieces and placed them in the mini muffin tins.  The original idea suggested that you use a butcher knife and cutting board to make the pieces, but I wanted my daughter to do as much as she could to help and breaking them worked just fine.

You bake them in the oven for 15 minutes at 230 degrees.  I sat them in an old cookie sheet to make transferring them more smooth.  This is what they look like when they come out of the oven.  Try not to disturb them until they cool so that the colors don't mix.

Next, we popped them out of the muffin tins.  This was no easy task and I am sure there is a trick to it.  I will have to do  a little more research to see how to get them out with more ease.  They didn't take long to cool, maybe 15 minutes tops!

We used scrap paper to cut out stems and leaves.  The original idea we had was to use wiggle eyes and black paper to make them into jack-o-lanterns, but after peeling all the crayons my daughter was just about crafted out, so I wanted to keep it simple from there on out.  We used Elmer's Glue, but noticed that some of the stems and leaves popped off when we transferred them to another container.  If we do it again, we may try glue dots.

Here is our little pumpkin patch.  We noticed that some of the ones with more red in them looked like apples.  You could make apples by using more reds and pinks.  My daughter plans to take these to school next week to give away to her classmates.  Enjoy!

Showing Appreciation

Last week was Pastor Appreciation Sunday at our church.  I have been working with the children's Sunday School class this month on making a gift for our pastors to help show our appreciation for all they do. 

We made fall wreaths for each of them.  The children and adults traced their hands on colorful scrapbooking paper.  We cut out the hands and used markers to write the word "thank you" in many different languages on each hand.  We got the list of foreign languages off the internet.  The children had a great time learning to say thank you in so many different languages.  This was a fun activity that involved many different age groups!  We then took a piece of brown bulletin board paper and twisted it like a vine and made the base for the wreath out of that.  The hands were glued on and an beautiful wired ribbon was added.  Before giving the gifts, we added a tag that said, "No matter how you say it, we're thankful for you!"