This week Briton doesn't have homework. At all. They are doing some kind of assessment in class which, I guess, means their brains are too friend by 3 to be taxed anymore. So they get a free week. Now I'm usually a big proponent of homework. Even when I'm explaining for the thirtieth time that if you would just DO the homework you'd be DONE with the homework, I still think it's a good thing. I've been known to give extra homework when folders and packets are "accidentally" left at school even. But that being said, it's been really, really nice to not have to deal with it this week. To have the afternoons filled with playing outside with friends and upstairs with sisters and just not having to make sure that the word problems have been solved two different ways and the spelling words are all correct. To just have time. Time to do something fun. Like make crayons.
Whoops, did I say make crayons? Ok, not really make make them, but melt them down into something more exciting than a stick make them.Every year I try to have some little activity for the kids to work on at the Pumpkin Party. We've painted gourds and plastered stickers on pumpkins and made masks, standard Halloween party fare. But this year I decided to go simple and stick with coloring. For one thing it's usually the little kids who want to do the crafts, so coloring is a pretty good bet for fun there, but also, there are a lot more kids coming this year, so for the sake of economy, we're going with crayons.
OK, OK, I just wanted an excuse to play with hot wax and candy molds.
This afternoon, instead of estimation and word study and reading logs, Briton helped me sort two boxes of crayons by color, peel the paper off of the oranges and blues and purples (and a few pinks, because he's a good brother and knew someone would want a pink one) and broke them up to be melted in the double boiler.
Except the double boiler thing was taking forever, so really we just put the top of the double boiler straight on the stove (good thing that thing only cost 50 cents!) Once we had thing nice and melty, we poured the crayon wax into skull shaped candy molds so we could have fun, scary (well, scaryish, how scary can a pink skull really be?) crayons.Obviously an adult should handle the hot wax but Briton was old enough to help steady the molds (which, by the way, are all of $1 at Michels at the moment - yay for procrastination!) and both kids had fun ripping apart the crayons. And now I'm envisioning all sorts of themed crayon fun...numbers, Christmas trees, lollipops to give people on April Fools Day....too mean? Ok, maybe not the candy ones then. :)