#Made4Math Monday!

It's been a looong time since I've done a #Made4Math and I don't know if I'll ever do one again, so when I started working on this project last night I thought I'd take advantage of it!

I have two elementary-aged children who bring home pencil boxes full of broken crayons (and markers and pencils and all kinds of other stuff) at the end of each school year. Yesterday my daughter and I sifted through those boxes, pulled out the "keepers" and bagged up the pieces.  I've seen pictures of things that people have done with old broken crayons and thought I'd give one a try.

One of my students got me this pi ice cube tray this year:

I couldn't imagine that I would ever actually make pi ice cubes, so I repurposed it (after first checking to make sure the silicone would be ok in the oven).

I peeled (ugh) and cut up some crayons and filled up the pi's. I chose to go multi-colored, but it would also be really cute with just complimentary colors.

Then I popped the tray (on an aluminum-covered cookie sheet) in the oven at 250 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

After I let it cool for a few minutes I popped the tray in the freezer overnight. The pi's weren't too bad to get out of the tray today, but I was happy that the silicone bent a lot - it made things much easier.

Aren't they cute?  There was a ledge around the top that I ended up scraping off with a knife.  

A few observations:

1.  The pi's look better flipped over.  The colors look cooler. 

2.  Did you notice that there were 12 spots in the tray and only 10 pi's are pictured?  I broke a couple getting them out.  But I wasn't too bummed about it because the broken pieces made tau's!

And last but not least,

3.  What am I going to do with 10 pi crayons and 2 tau crayons?! :)