Thumbs Up to bottle caps
When we were children, the availability of resources like art, craft material, toys was limited. Hence, every bit of junk was treasured by us. Even a toothpaste tube was cherished for the guns, buses, catapults, etc., that we could make out of it.
Lifestyles have changed but the value of junk has not. We present some junk-based games, activities and ideas to make learning come alive, active and involving. Let us not throw, rather let us grow – learning, creativity and sensitivity towards our environment.
Here is the first article in the series – just using cold drink bottle crowns (caps). We have purposefully not gone into details – but present a whole host of random ideas to tickle your imagination and lead to classroom work with children. Innovate on your own, involve children and enjoy.
- Create a banking / currency system with caps as coins. Caps can be coloured (or different brand names used to denote different denominations). Children can earn, save, spend, barter, and transact amongst themselves.
- Use the caps in sculpting – children use pliers, small hammers and their imagination.
- Stack the caps and see how many can be stacked before the pile falls. How many fell? How many were left standing? Subtraction is a concept that can be learned here.
- Paint emotion icons (emoticons) on the cap. Punch a hole, pass a thread and wear them to express how you are feeling. Make children aware of their feelings by giving it to them when they are exhibiting a particular emotion.
- Use the caps as tiny information buttons (flash cards or badges). Write key words, bits of fun stuff, instructions, secret codes, etc. Now decorate yourself, your rooms, bags, etc., with these.
- Flip it (like heads and tails). Check the probability of landing on smooth / hollow side. Use tally marks. Make graphs, have competitions and so on.
- Make geometric polygons and other shapes like triangle, hexagon, etc., out of the caps. Compare different shapes (say triangles) based on the number of caps used to make a side.
- Imagine yourself to be a cap and write a small story of its journey from the cap factory to the dustbin. Add fun to the story – for example, by making the cap do crazy things in the party in which it was opened.
- Roll the cap and see how many rotations it made to get to a certain distance. See if any circumference formula can be derived/validated.
- Make a clinking noise using multiple caps and play a game of estimating how many caps were used to produce that sound.
- Check sound made by the caps against different surfaces, different heights, etc. Tabulate the results. Categorize different surfaces based on the sounds that they produce. Guess what is creating different sounds from different surfaces.
- Make patterns and designs using caps. Create all kinds of rangoli designs, visual designs, things (cars, trucks), symbols and so on. Create designs using the caps directly or using the outline of the cap repetitively.
- Divide the caps equally among all present. See what is left (remainder). Make stacks of 2, 3 and 4 to learn multiplication tables. Similarly divide the same lot into different numbered sets to understand the concept of factors.
- Play a game of tic-tac-toe on the floor using two different sides as two players’ coins. Similarly you can also explore the wonderful game of Reversi or Othello.
- Let us make different sounds using caps. Make different fun instruments using junk material like string, boxes, cans, sticks, etc. Now let us play our instruments together like an orchestra.
- Stand back to back holding a cap in between two backs (or two knees or two shoulders or even two cheeks). Move around, or dance to music. If the cap falls, that team is eliminated till only one team remains. Or have a race.
- Why are all caps circle shaped? Explore. Try fixing these caps to different bottles.
- Take turns at putting one cap in the middle – the rule is that you have to put a cap that is different from the one the person before you put in (sprite can be followed by coca cola but not by sprite again). The one who gets rid of all his caps first is the winner.
- Write a funny, crazy essay about the cap. Look at it from different perspectives – like what will a cat think of it or what a straw has to stay about it and so on.
- Throw caps on floor (river) and cross the river only by stepping on caps - no touching the ground.
- Close your eyes and show, using the caps, the concept of remainder and quotient.
- Take each preposition – write one on each cap (use marker or paper + tape). Now go around the classroom and put the relevant cap in a place which defines the preposition. (Like ‘below’ cap is below the table, while ‘besides’ cap is besides the chair, etc.)
- Calculate the area of anything – notebook, room, table, my feet, etc., in terms of units of bottle caps. Find heights, lengths, etc., to explore the concept of units in measurement.
- Make a song about bottle caps (a rap about a cap!)
- Have a cap race (by rolling them on the floor) – whose cap goes further and why? Children can try to predict, calculate the shortfall, make graphs about the different rolls and calculate distances travelled, speeds, etc.
- Play this role play - How would I feel if I were a coke bottle cap? What would I do? How would I interact with other things around me? What would the bottle think / say to me. What would I like people to do with me once they open me.
- Create a tattoo on your hands, legs, etc., using the edge of the cap – press it hard on your skin and it will soon form the pattern – make designs using full or partial circle of the cap and if you like the design, use a marker to darken and make it last for few hours.
- Make accessories and junk jewellery using caps (bracelet, arm band, ear ring, necklace, etc.)
- Use caps for charting - do statistics or survey in class (say how many languages can each kid speak). Make a bar chart using caps.
- In teams write down as many words as you can think of related to bottle caps. Classify them by grammatical concepts (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc.)
- Have a race / competition (in teams) to write 100 things that one can do with these bottle caps (great way for children to realize value in junk)
- Write/describe what would happen if the cap was not there. Or write a letter from a cap to the bottle or vice-versa. Ode to the cap from the bottle, etc.
- Balancing games - Put as many caps as possible on head or feet or whole body and walk from start to finish; or spin on pencil, balance on 10 finger tips, or nose …. or competition of balancing maximum coins on one’s body
- Balance/roll cap on body parts - try as many as possible. Just have fun playing with the caps on your body.
- Make a random pile of caps on floor. Each one takes turn at removing one cap at a time without moving others.
- Play cap variations of games like carom, hopscotch, marbles, aiming at each other’s caps, flipping into a box, basket ball, throwing into holes of different sizes (with different scores), cricket, football, etc.
- Juggle caps - try as many as possible.
- Create models of mountains, plateaus, rivers, etc., using bottle caps. Children may use actual cement to bind or use glue solutions.
- Children find out as many ways of re-using the caps. They can also research what happens to caps that get collected in the cold drink shops – how are they being recycled (if at all).
- Children bury 36 caps in mud packs (use disposed juice packs or curd cartons to do this. They open one mud pack every month to see how the caps decompose over time.
- The teacher gives one cap to each child in the class without telling the purpose. She checks who still has the cap after, say, a day / week / month. Then the whole class tries to keep “safely” as many caps for say a term. Children chart how responsible they have been for the safety of the caps (the fact that these are almost valueless makes it more fun).
We hope you like
What one might
Just do with caps
Or play all night.
Classes are for learning
But it’s all right
If we have some fun
And some insight;
if what is usually thrown
instead be used all right.
