Open Ended Art ~ Crayons

My friend Shannon at Teaching my Little Bookworm is an amazing mother and teacher! She does some of the coolest things with her kids, and is so incredibly organized as she homeschools her preschooler!

She sponsors a weekly art project, in addition to many other things, called Open Ended Art. With this she will give you a medium with which to work, and asks that you cut your kids loose to make art projects with that medium.

Since I have different combinations of 4 year old girls throughout the week, I thought I might try to tag along with her. I may not be able to do it every week, but if we hit a couple of times a month it will be worth it.

This week's Open Ended Art project was to be done with crayons. And that means you could do anything with crayons you wanted!

I planned to do stained glass with crayon shavings, but realized I didn't have any wax paper. Being stumped, and not wanting to copy anything anyone else had already done, I considered skipping this one. But while making Eli's sandwich this morning I saw my ziploc bags and was inspired. Morgan and Makenna were here today, along with my Brynne and her friend Kate. (I was lucky to have little help from Kate's mom). Here is what we did:

1. I grated crayons onto plates. Each girl got the same four colors, and then got to choose a 5th color.

2. I took quart sized ziploc bags and cut the sides to flatten them out into opened rectangles (keeping the bottom intact).

3. The girls sprinkled the grated crayons onto the ziploc in whatever pattern they liked.

4. We closed back up the ziploc (so the shavings were in between the front and back of the ziploc, like it had never been cut), layed a towel over it and ironed it until the crayons were melted.

5. And we ended up with stained glass.

6. Here are all four girls' end products.

This was fun, Shannon! I can't wait to see what everybody else does.