Don’t Throw Out Your Old Christmas Lights!

As I have transitioned into my role as a GT (gifted and talented) teacher this year, I have found myself saving recyclables and trash of all sorts.  Now, before recyclable day at home, I find myself making a separate pile for taking items to school.  The recyclable man for my house gets NOTH-ING…almost :).  Students have used their imagination to build furniture and other unusual items out of their recyclables.  They have amazed me with their creativity!

Look at the detail in the picture below…a ceiling fan hangs from the ceiling.  A piece of milk carton plastic has been cut for a “SMART board”.  Little egg carton pieces make chairs.

Most recently students built a model GT classroom.  One of the requirements was that the model have five pieces of furniture.  One of the other requirements was that the model have at least two working lights.  Some of the most impressive models had “light fixtures” built out of bottle caps and other random pieces of plastic.  The models were most impressive!

Below you can barely see the lighting glowing in the background.  Students have made little chairs out of bottle caps and round circle tables.  Their SMART table is seen on the right corner made out of painted styrofoam.

To economically allow students to build a lit model, I had to acquire lighting from somewhere.  I certainly didn’t have the funding to buy all of the students lighting–especially because it seemed that the lights were blowing out with too much voltage from the batteries.  So where did I get lighting?  You guessed it!  I was able to acquire lighting from a parent getting rid of old Christmas lights.  She got rid of at least five strands of Christmas lights.   Just because some of the strands didn’t work, doesn’t mean we weren’t able to use them.  We were able to pull each bulb out and use the bulbs individually.

Sometimes we were able to cut the green wire with the bulb included and have the bulbs work that way, but that didn’t work very often for us.  When we pulled the bulbs out of the strand, we had the single bulbs.  The single bulbs had two wires sticking out that looked like bug antennas.  We were able to attach one end to the positive and one end to the negative end of a battery for them to work.  Christmas light bulbs will work with 1.5 volts, so we learned not to put too many batteries with just one bulb or they blew out.  Students can cut the extra green wire left on the strand to wire to the ends of the light bulbs.  Then they attach them to batteries, and in our case we put light switches ($0.69 each) in the circuits.

Below one of the models is shown with the lighting glowing a bit.

Students really enjoyed this project.  This did  take several weeks to complete.  I hope this gives you some ideas for your own students and classes.