Crayola ColorCycle

Have you heard about Crayola's ColorCycle program? Someone told me about it last week and I just got both my schools signed up. Similar to the Elmer's Glue Crew program I described here, you just set up a collection bin at your school and when your box is full, the company will pay for shipping to collect the waste. From their website,

Crayola ColorCycle - Turn Crayola Markers Into Energy!

Crayola and schools across North America are banding together to help kids understand the importance of their role in protecting the environment. That’s why we are launching Crayola ColorCycle. Through this initiative, students in K-12 schools across the continental United States and parts of Canada can collect used markers and send them to a conversion facility where they will be transformed into clean-burning fuel.

How cool is that? The FAQ section states that they will accept other brands' markers, not just Crayola. They even accept dry erase markers and highlighters. Your school doesn't earn any money for this program, but it's still a great thing to do and a fun way to teach students about recycling. I've just got to make a cool box to hold the dried up markers now! Will you join me in recycling? I hope so!

Prang vs. Crayola... sort of

I read a post over at Deep Space Sparkle today where Patty discusses her favorite paint supplies for the classroom.  She mentioned that she was looking to try pan watercolors other than Prang.  Last year, one of the teachers at school brought me a whole box full of Art supplies that were left from her classroom.  Included in the box were several trays of Crayola watercolors.  I came up with the brilliant plan of making two watercolor paintings, one with Prang and one with Crayola, so I could compare the results.  What I didn't count on was that I would end up wanting to make paintings with two totally different color schemes!  I ended up with two paintings of birds but other than that, they aren't very similar so my color comparison experiment is a bust.  I think I should just do something simple like a color wheel to compare.  I'll add that to my list of 137 things to do. :)

Here is a wood duck painted with Prang watercolors, below is a rainforest bird (I think some kind of bee eater but I'm having trouble with the identification) painted with Crayola watercolors.