Crayon Hearts! This would be my easy no-effort valentine to my students. I was even excited to jazz them up a bit by taping them on cardstock hearts (cut out with my Cricut) and wrapping a color ribbon around them. I found a silicoln heart baking dish at Walmart for $2.50 and along with two giant boxes of crayons from the dollar store I was ready to have the cutest homemade valentines for under $5.
Reality soon hit me when I spent more time than I had imagined just unwrapping those crayons from their wrappers but eventually they were unwrapped and cut up into about 5 pieces per crayon ready to go. Reality then hit even harder when I pulled the first batch out of the oven after melting time was up:
No, those aren't brownies. Those are gorgeous crayon valentines. Nailed it!
A few things were obviously wrong here. I took out all the brown, gray, black, and dark colored crayons to brighten it up and broke the remaining crayons into 2-3 pieces for larger chunks of color. A fellow teaching friend who had done this craft many times before said to only use crayola but I stuck with the dollar store crayons. The above fixes seemed to do the trick and I ended up with some cute and colorful- although not at cute as pinterest- valentines for the students.
The top was the first batch, the lower ones are the second batch for comparison.
The students thought these were really cool crayons and liked that I had made them myself (my artsy abilities are known as "Mrs. Berryjam's magic"). I'm also glad they had something that was not candy in their Valentine bags. I was not expecting so much candy to make its way into my classroom. It seems this year's "it" valentines were Spongebob themed Fun Dips. If you aren't familiar with Fun Dip it is literally a pack of sugar you dip a hard candy sugared stick into and eat. Don't get me started on the red dye in the many cupcakes each child got to take home!
After learning the tricks and some trial and error I think I will do this every year for my students. It's cheap and although it takes some time (especially with a mold that only holds six) it really is fun. Maybe pairing it up with a coloring book would be cute as well to go the extra mile, but I'm a teacher's budget and I don't want to spoil my kids. That's what Christmas was for.
