10 Great Low Cost Teaching Tools

1. 10GREAT
LOW-COST
EACHING
OOLST

2. INTRODUCTION
Low cost teaching aid refers to aid
prepared with simple materials costing
very little by involving teacher and
student. An expensive aid could be
prepared easily with little or no money
to make learning effective,
comprehensive and fascinating.

3. •The science teacher with a certain amount of skill
and enthusiasm can replace many pieces of
apparatus by an adequate if unconventional,
improvised substitutes.

4. Low cost teaching aids have an advantage of
offering learning by doing approach to the teaching
learning process. When teachers and students plan,
produce or create their own educational materials,
they invariably manifest pride and pleasure in
utilizing them to the maximum

5. Tool 1:
Scissors
(and
scratch
paper)
These can be distributed to students for
instant writing tasks that require just a
few words or sentences from learners,
such as
short poems based on patterns, lists,
polls, pictures, maps, interview
questions, charts, flashcards and
dictations

6. These pieces of papers can also be used to quickly
generate describing and guessing games (McCaughey
2009). For instance, if everyone in the class writes the
name of a famous person on his or her square of paper,
or the names of three cities, or five types of fruit, we
have, in minutes, a great deal of content for games.

7. • When these games are played in small
groups, we are activating the class, with an
emphasis on having students “doing and
producing rather than passively receiving”.

8. Many teachers draw activities to a close in
an artificial way by asking “Is everyone
done?” or “Do you need more time?” I say
“artificial” because usually only a few
students respond and these responses may
not accurately represent the group as a
whole. Moreover, it is unlikely that such
“yes/no” questions will elicit a true answer
(Gabrielatos 1997).
Tool 2:
Timers

9. Timers are good tool to keep students focused and a good
pace in each lesson. Providing time limits can change the
mood of an activity too and perhaps even how effectively
students work. At any rate, with a time limit your students
will probably worry less about grammar errors and more
about finishing the task at hand.

10. Teachers can get a visible countdown device but
nowadays, with the advances in technology, you can use
different tools created especially for helping teacher’s
work; such as online egg timer which is a countdown timer
display on a screen or free applications you can download
on your devices and so on.
 Click here to see different types of clocks and timers: https://www.online-stopwatch.com/classroom-timers/

11. Tool 3:
Call
Bell
In a perfect world, the start of class would be
characterized by students primly sitting at their
desks with sharp pencils, open textbooks, and
clean notebook paper at the ready.
In the real world, the start of class is all too often
characterized by students slouched against desks
gossiping about Friday night’s party while
throwing annoyed glances at their teacher who is
trying her best to direct their attention to the
latest scene from Romeo and Juliet.

12. This is an exasperating problem for many educators, but one that can
be overcome by establishing firm guidelines in the beginning. Students
should have meaningful work to do the moment they enter class. You
can use the term “Bell Work," but the name can be adapted to suit
your class and style. Bell Work is a short assignment that must be
started before the bell rings. Students know that as soon as they enter
the classroom, they have important work to do.

13. • To be successful, Bell Work must be meaningful and teachers
must be consistent when assigning it. This is not busy work; it
should be directly related to your subject. There is no reason
it must always pertain directly to the day’s lesson, but
students should always be able to see the connection with
your class. If they can see bell work's relationship to your
class, they are more likely to take it seriously, making it much
easier to keep students on-task.

14. •Actually, you can use any sound device a whistle, a
buzzer, a horn from a bicycle, etc. You can even
use specific musical themes recorded on your
MP3 player, computer o mobile phone. The trick is
to have a distinct sound that signifies
START and STOP.

15. Tool 4:
Pizza
box
lids
Pizza lids make
great canvases
for student-
designed
advertisements,
posters, or
sequential art or
comic strips.

16. Tool 5:
Dice
It’s a board game that can be used as springboard
for speaking or writing, for instance, you can
present innumerable patterns on the board. Let’s
use the following paradigm for building sentences
with the modal auxiliary can to show ability.

17. Students in groups take turns rolling the dice. If a student
rolls 4, he makes a “can” sentence with the word ghosts, such
as “Ghosts can walk through walls.” If he rolls a six:
“Presidents can do almost anything they want!” During the
course of the activity, the teacher can—and should—erase
and replace words every minute or so, changing, for example,
ghosts to rich people, presidents to fish, and so on.

18.  Students are encouraged to elaborate on their
experiences wherever possible. Examples:
 “I haven’t been to the bank today. But I went on
Tuesday.”
 “I have been to two countries that begin with the
letter M: Moldova and Malta.”
 These tasks last just five minutes or so, but the
focus of practice is entirely on the learners.

19. With two or more dice per group or dice of different
colors, you can make more advanced tasks. I always
carry about ten dice in my bag: 6-sided, 10-sided, and
20-sided. They allow for a lot of invention. You can
learn how to make your own dice from paper or
cardboard at
www.teach2theplanet.com/diceweb.html.

20. Tool 6:
Colored
Markers
Markers may be just glorified pens, but
it’s worth calling attention to them
because they are cheap enough to
provide in bulk, and that’s how they are
most useful.

21. Having a selection of colors makes writing and
artistic tasks more fun. Students can use markers
to make different games, cards in a colorful way,
just be sure that there are enough markers and
papers to foster students’ creativity while language
is being develop too.

22. Using this tool, is a cheap way too enough
to be a solution of lack of materials and
have fun with students. At the end,
students can post their piece of art or
works in a poster session in a place where
everyone can appreciate them, or even in a
portfolio to see how well students have
progress in their works during the lesson.

23. Tool 7:
Sticky
Putty
 What is Blue-tack?
 Well, for those who have not encountered
it, it is a tacky blue substance which is used
widely across the globe to stick things to
walls and doors. There are many different
forms of "tack", including the generally
shops-own brand, "White-tack" and the
non-existent revolution of "pritt-tack" (TM)
(from the makers of the often
indispensable but quite incomprehensible
"pritt stick" (TM)).

24.  Blu-Tack holds up: Posters, cards, paintings, decorations, maps, messages and
much more
 Blu-Tack holds down: Ornaments, telephones, photographs in albums, screws to
screwdrivers, model parts during construction or painting
 Blu-Tack: Cleans fluff from fabric and dirt from keyboards.

25.  What to do with Blue-tack
 The best way to use blue-tack is to take it between your thumb and forefinger, and to roll it
around into a ball, until the heat from your hands melts it slightly and it becomes soft and
pliable. Do not roll it too much or it will become too sticky and soft. Squash the blue-tack into
a disc shape and press it hard against the corner of the paper/poster/article that you want to
stick to the wall/door/ceiling. When you have placed discs of blue-tack in all the corners,
press the tacked item against the wall and apply pressure to the tacked corners. When this
has been done remove your hand from the tacked item, and with a prayer to your chosen
deity, it should stay there. Easy, isn't it?

26. What not to do with Blue-tack
It is very easy to abuse blue-tack, and its misuse has lead to many domestic disasters and tack-related
stress (this is true). However, if you follow this easy list of points to be aware of, you need not be stricken
by these afflictions.
1. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to eat blue-tack. I myself have tried it and speak from
experience. It tastes awful. This may sound like a daft thing to do, but on some occasions (e.g. the person
involved was drunk) blue-tack has been mistaken for chewing gum. It is not a good substitute and gets
stuck in the teeth.
2. Do not use blue-tack to pick dust/bits of fluff/mud/toenail clippings off the floor. This leads to very dirty
blue-tack which leaves black marks on everything it touches, and also makes it much harder to knead.
3. Do not assume that blue-tack will hold up posters/paper etc. for any fixed length of time. Blue-tack is
very unreliable in this aspect, and seems to have a mind (and hidden agenda) of its own.

27. Tool 8:
Modeling
Clay
Try a “dic-clay-tion,” like a dictation,
except instead of writing the word for
the object that you say aloud (e.g.,
house, glass, face, dog) students are
allowed 30 seconds (use your timer!)
to mold a clay representation of the
word.

28. Perhaps this interaction with the object will help in retaining vocabulary;
even if not, it’s fun for a change of pace. With young learners, we
sometimes forget to appeal to those skills they already have, even
though focusing on those skills will encourage success.
More advanced learners and adults can do group projects with clay—for
instance, they can make a basic schematic of their home or hometown
or a topographical map of an island, while pointing out and explaining
the various parts.

29. Tool 9:
Playing
Cards
Playing cards can be adapted for hundreds
of efficient language learning games.
However, their biggest value in the
classroom, for me, is in forming groups.
Cards can divide learners neatly into pairs,
groups, or a number of other student
formations.

30. You can deal out cards by color (red and black)
to divide the class at random into two big
teams. Or use suits (hearts, spades, diamonds,
clubs) for groups. Deal out 20 pairs and your
students will need to find their partners: red
jack finds the other red jack, black 10 finds the
other black 10, and so on.

31.  This table shows a short, simple, action-packed way to
work with vocabulary. This example, based on adjectives
to describe personalities, is for more advanced groups.
 Choose 13 words or phrases and write a list so that each
vocabulary item corresponds to a card in the deck.
 Put the deck in the middle of a desk. One card is turned
over at a time. The first player to say (usually shout in this
game) the corresponding word collects that card. The
player with the most cards at the end of the game is the
winner.

32. Tool
10:
Javvy
Javvy (pronounced HAH-vee) is a small gray stuffed
animal. He helps present new language,
illustrating verbs like flip, rotate or pounce.
Though Javvy speaks to students, puppets or
stuffed animals can work especially well when
they are silent. Any stuffed animal or soft toy can
be used in a classroom to ensure students
participation, make turns to speak, go to the board
or ask questions and so on.

33. It’s more common the use of these toys in reading and speaking
because some children can get happier while reading to stuffed
animals like if they were humans. Also, they catch more the attention
of the students than any other thing especially if they are kids.
Puppets can help students to develop fluency by
speaking each other about any topic.