Crafts and games are easy to put together and make engaging teaching tools. Using common household throwaway items, kids learn about recycling and construction technology. An old computer mouse, for example, can be turned into a frog or whale toy, or even a race car by gluing some wheels on its underbelly. Throwing on a small motor will make it especially fun. Take an old CD, throw a pair of wings on it cut out from paper and you've got a beautiful Christmas tree ornament. Kids can learn mapping skills by creating their own treasure map, organizing a scavenger hunt and then hunting it all down. Or setting up a miniature golf course, either inside or outside, can teach them about orientation and distance and can reinforce important mapping skills.
Students can learn much within science while engaged in everyday technologies they probably take for granted. Static electricity for example, and the moving around of electrons, can be experimented with by charging objects by rubbing them, or combing hair, and then experimenting with the electrons that result using different charging sources, grounding points. They can even create "charging stations" and study Coulomb's Law on charged objects and force fields. Kids can also record observations in observation journals. Journals can be used to observe and record changing leaves in the fall for environmental science activities, recording changes with sunlight, water supply and the seasons. Collecting leaves and adding rubbing alcohol to them (chopped up) can inspire leaf colors to bleed and change as students realize and experiment with the breakdown of chlorophyll.
Literacy activities take very few resources and just a little creative thinking. Kids can make shape poems as a way to reinforce and introduce them to poetry while experimenting with, or even discovering for the first time, their own voice as a writer. Shape poems introduce them to concepts about poetry to include verse, rhythm and rhyme. Vocabulary is reinforced through an online thesaurus to help them locate sensory words and then shape its line construction to an object of their own creation by drawing, using Word art or Internet searching. Blogging is another way for students to practice literacy skill while using the technologies they engage in at home. They can write blogs on any appropriate topic, ask questions to each other on their blogs, make comments and even coach each other on their writing using a peer coaching method to give and receive feedback. Creative writing also takes center stage when kids can pick their own topics, write about them, then show their product off to friends and family. Start an Internet café to showcase their work and expand it to a live after-school café that allows them to read out loud their poems, blogs or anything else they've written to a live audience.