The first one was Owen's suggestion, from a project his class did at school last year. His finished project was so nice that the art teacher kept it over the summer to take to an art show (well, that's what Owen told me ;-). The kids drew pictures with pencil, colored them with crayons, then the teacher put their paper on a hot pad of some sort (it was plugged in?) and the kids used crayons again to color certain parts of the picture again, allowing the crayon to melt as they pressed over the hot picture. We used a hot cookie sheet as our "hot pad". Here are my kid's versions, hanging in the front window because they looked cool there:
This afternoon, we made candles. Our version of making candles involves using old chunks of wax, collected over the months of candle-buring that we love to do in our house. We collect drips and the stubs that are left.
The kids sorted the pieces into colors (loosely - a lot of the candles were already hand-made by us and have lost a lot of their original color by mixing!) and I melted the wax in our home-made double boiler. I used one of my good pots for the bottom of the double boiler, and an old camping pot of my parents that is now in my kid's play kitchen. I still managed to get wax in my good pot! IT is hard to clean the wax out, so I suggest you find another not-used-for-food pot to be part of your double boiler if you try this :-) 
The kids made up their own candle forms using cardboard, tape, old plastic drinking bottles, etc. Here they are being poured
And cooling
Ready to remove from forms:
And here are the final candles:
The next photo folder is one of my favorites. I followed the kids around for about 30 minutes, just taking tons of pictures while they did their normal stuff. I used the sepia setting on my camera. I wish I could just post them all, it is fun to view them all in a row. I will post one series anyway (since they are edited and therefore load quickly :-) just to give you an idea.
August 6th, 2003:
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