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Robin Simons
With a fantastic name (although what it does would now be called reusing not recycling), an environmental premise and a target audience of teachers, children and families this is right up my alley. It came out of the work of the Recycle centre at Boston Children’s Museum. The book focusses mostly on items you would find in your home (although there may be some need for general craft supplies) but also talks about the space for cooperatives and community projects contacting factories and sharing useful things discarded in the manufacturing process. Throughout the book ideas are given to allow people to adapt the ideas and think about what materials are used to make certain things.
There are lots of different sections with lots of great ideas. I will go through each giving a brief overview and some of my favourites from each section. I will link to separate pages with the instructions so as not to make this page too busy.
Games
The games section is split into trail games (think snakes and ladders), word games, card games, bingo type games, strategy games and coordination games. Lots of the games are of an educational bent and could be used in phonics, maths or English lessons.
The ones I most want to try include:
Operations which is a bit like a cross between connect 4 and mental maths gymnastics. It looks great for inspiring creative manipulation of numbers while staying with fairly small numbers.
Six-in-a-sentence which looks like a great game for building that elusive idea of what makes a sentence.
13 sets of famous people – Basically a make your own Go Fish, it would be lots of fun to research and make these, making them diverse and using all the different categories to develop cultural capital.
Lots of the strategy game ideas look lots of fun and have left me planning to start hoarding my bottle tops. I also loved the simplicity of playing Othello (which is a great game) with heads and tails of coins.
The marble maze made out of a shoebox looks like a lot of fun, I particularly like that it naturally invites children to express themselves in how they create it.
Science
The science section includes various musical instruments, I am always a bit sceptical of the idea of making recycled instruments as it brings thoughts of elastic band tissue boxes which don’t tend to bring a great sound. This section is written mostly with a spirit of investigation of how to create different tones and pitches. In the rest of the science section I particularly like the Water Clock, partly because it is a great example of lots of questions to inspire curiosity and deep understanding of a concept. A general focus of the science section is on tools to measure to allow people to investigate things they are interested in.
Crafts
This again has a focus on making components that allow you to make whatever you want. It has lots of way to make rods and joins, again written with a spirit of investigation. I was also naturally drawn to a bit about bookmaking, particularly the fold out books and printing, particularly using corrugated cardboard. There a whole variety of looms to make and I particularly liked the idea of irregular weaving and the bag loom. A particularly good example of the way the book does things is the section on wheels which shows lots of different ways of making wheels, bodies and joins of vehicles. There are a wide variety of projects at the end of the book, from television to terrarium.
There are lots of exciting one off projects in the book but there are opportunities for a wider school focus too, especially tying in to a sustainability focus. The introduction talks about the possibilities for learning in writing to factories and negotiating to set up a scrap scheme. The managing of this as a school and thinking about what parts you might need for different things you want to make would help get a sense of where the things we use come from and the waste involved in that process and also how to work together as a cooperative to do something about it. It would be lovely to see this book reissued, perhaps with an additional chapter on the repurposing of old tech.
Written by Jack.
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