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Decorate a pumpkin using melted crayons!
- Make a prediction - Why do you think it’s important to use a white pumpkin for this activity?
- Hot glue crayons to the stem of the pumpkin
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Use the hair dryer to melt the crayons and watch them decorate the pumpkin! Can you change the direction the hair dryer is blowing air to alter the direction of the melting?
Wonder Out Loud: Why do crayons melt?
Crayons are made out of wax, similar to candles, and pigments, which give the crayons their individual colors. When wax is in a cool environment, it stays solid. You can feel this if you squeeze a crayon in your hand - it stays hard instead of squishing. When wax is heated up, it reaches a point where it begins to melt. As soon as the heat source is removed, however, the wax returns to its original solid state.
Bytesized Facts: Crayons
- Crayola makes 3 billion crayons a year! That’s enough to give every elementary school in America over 46,000 crayons.
- When Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith started selling boxes of Crayola crayons, there were eight colors in each box: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, black, and brown.
- The biggest crayon in the world is called “Big Blue.” It was made for Crayola’s 100 year anniversary by collecting leftover blue crayons from kids all over America - 123,000 to be exact! Big Blue is over 15 feet long and weighs 1,500 pounds.
Click here to download the PDF to the Tie-Dye Pumpkins lab sheet.
