Aluminum foil
Beads
Buttons
Building Blocks, LEGOS, wood blocks
Cardboard boxes
Cardstock
Clothes pins
Construction paper
Cotton balls
Crayons, colored pencils, and markers
Dried pasta
Glue
Marbles
Masking tape/painters tape
Notecards
Paper plates
Paper towel tubes
Pipe cleaners
Plastic cup (both small and regular size)
Play-doh
Pom poms
Popsicle sticks
Rubber bands
Rulers
Scissors
Straws
String/yarn
Toilet roll tubes
Toothpicks
A note on supplies by Bernie Zubrowski:
To Bernie, the essence of his "small science" can be experienced and grasped by kids, parents, and teachers using everyday stuff bought from a hardware or grocery store, or scavenged from under the sink. Half-gallon milk cartons, filled with ordinary sand, could work as sturdy classroom blocks for building structures. Paper towels and Easter egg dyes could allow families to separate colors in a kitchen chromatography experiment. Aluminum pie plates, spindled back to back with paper cups serving as turbine blades, could become waterwheels. Contraptions rigged from coat hangers, soda straws, string, and cafeteria trays would let visitors stretch or blow huge or tiny—but always elegant—bubbles using dishwashing detergent. (The secret: full-strength Proctor & Gamble Joy.)
These activities were mostly worked out by Bernie in community centers with neighborhood kids. They were built on his early experiments teaching science in Bangladesh villages using natural and salvaged materials, and later modified as curriculum units for the Education Development Center in the African Science Project, post Sputnik, when America was trying to catch up with the Russians.
What started in response to Third World underdevelopment became Bernie's passion and doctrine in Boston: keeping classroom and neighborhood science inexpensive, accessible, and understandable. Simple tools and materials were things to be treasured and celebrated.