Enriching Activities to do at Home (that don't require special materials)

Orly’s List of Fun, Enriching, and Educational Activities:

• build a city out of empty boxes and cans
• make a dollhouse using empty boxes and cans
• use cardboard tubes to make a marble run
• attach boxes together to make a giant robot, dragon, or whatever!
• make a diorama
• make a musical instrument
• use cans to make a mobile or wind chime
• create a bottle cap mosaic
• do some papier mache (make paste from flour and water)
• design a playground for an ant
• build a domino run (you don’t even need dominos- try it with books or other objects)
• make a Rube Goldberg machine
• if you can, spend time outside in your yard or in the woods
• write a story
• draw cartoons/comics
• create a scavenger hunt around your home for your family
• make a board game
• make your own puppets and put on a puppet show for your family
• bake something (if you double the recipe or halve the recipe, you are doing math)
• cook something together
• “Chopped” (Based on the cooking show, pick three random ingredients and create a meal out of them. Once, my children used kix cereal, lemon, and cream cheese.)
• have a daily debate

Grade 3: Toothpick and Marshmallow Structures

The third graders have been learning about the stability of different shapes. They decided triangles are best. Here they are trying to use triangles to make tall towers.

Dragon Island

Second graders are creating an island for the dragon from My Father's Dragon. They made their island out of salt dough covering up crumpled pieces of paper. Here they are painting the islands. The next step will be to map out their islands using a grid system.

1st Graders Publish Poems about the Moon

I visited Laura's first grade classroom to help them with a project about the moon. They had written several sentences using adjectives to describe the moon. I worked with them on revising: the students cut apart their sentences and rearranged them until they liked the way their poem sounded. Some students even deleted one or two sentences. Then they published these poems with a painting of the moon. These paintings became flaps that lift up to show the poem hidden underneath.

6th Graders Design Boats

These 6th graders are using math and science to build boats and predict how many pennies their boats would hold.

The Land of Treble

Third graders are learning about our number system by imagining a place where things come in groups of three. Here they are playing a game called, "Race to a Trickle." In the Land of Treble, a trickle is the cost of a slurp (the pet everyone wants in Treble). Here the students roll a die, and then take gickles or bickles, trading them in until they have a trickle.

2nd Graders Celebrate Trees

The second graders completed a field guide to the trees in the Academy School forest. They celebrated by binding the books together and drinking tea made from pine needles and black birch sticks that they gathered.