Fancy Rocks

Today we made fancy rocks. It was a rainy day (yay for replenishing our rain barrels!), so I had to wait for the rain to let up. I gave each of the kids a baggie for collecting their favorite rocks from around the yard. They ran around hunting for the best rocks. My neighbor is 10 and she said to me with a smile, "This is like having an Easter hunt!" lol

Some of the kids filled their bags full of treasures while some had only a few.

After collecting the rocks, we washed them off and put them in the oven, just to heat them up. I think I had the oven at 275 degrees. After about 10-15 minutes I started giving the kids their rocks. I was a little nervous about the kids getting burned so I staggered the process. One big kid, one little kid.

I set up their station with wax paper on a cooling rack. I peeled back the crayons before they started. When they were given a rock, they set a crayon on the rock and watched the wax melt. It's really kinda cool! Some of them are solid and some have a swirly pattern.

Look at the concentration! The crayon melts right on the rock and drips down.




Smooth rocks worked the best and pourous rocks didn't melt the wax. We could color on them but the wax didn't pool up on them. After we figured this out we lost a lot of our rocks and just used the smooth black rocks.



You can blow the melted wax for a neat effect.





Ok, I did not mean for this picture to be watermarked! I watermark them by batch to speed things up. And the watermark is to keep the orkut thieves from stealing the pictures of my kids.





Anyway, by the time we got the rocks washed and "cooked" it was dark and stormy again so the inside pictures are kinda yucky! If I remember, I'll reshoot this one in better light so that you can see how beautiful the rocks are. After we were done, 3 more neighborhood kids came over and they all thought they were really cool and they all took one home. So I think this is a hit with all ages! All you need are rocks from your yard and crayons!!