For any teacher, coming up with innovative lesson plans and activities can be difficult. For an elementary school teacher, however, there is a little more room for innovation.

An article on Buzzfeed provides elementary school teachers with 19 "ridiculously simple DIYs" teachers can use in the classroom. DIY stands for "do it yourself", and the article highlights easy and cheap ways to get students engaged in the classroom.

The first activity on the list is to "create word family LEGO blocks." The photo has a bin of LEGOS with words written on the side including "wig", "bag", "sag", and "tag."

"The aim is for the child to sort through the blocks and create towers of the same word families," the article said. "This game will unfortunately pose the same threats to bare feet as normal LEGO pieces do. You’ve been warned."

Another activity on the list is using plastic spoons to "create a simple game for letter recognition and matching." The photo provided has a line of plastic spoons with the letters "A", "a", "B", "b", and "C", "c" written on them.

"Help students to identify lowercase and capital letters, match pairs of letters, and practice alphabetical order with this simple plastic spoon DIY," the article said. "Use clear spoons for the lowercase letters so that students can match them up and see-through to the capital letter."

One other activity Buzzfeed provided was "craft word family eggs." The photo is of plastic Easter eggs with different letters taped on each half.

"Students should twist the eggs, read out the word they’ve created, and write it down, which will help to improve both language and writing skills," the article said. "You could even put treats inside the eggs to encourage students to finish the entire word family and move onto another one with an incentive."

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Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor