We did a quick shift to a morning of DISASSEMBLY. Turns out kids REALLY LOVE IT when you give them tools and instruct them to break stuff. And yes, they can really do it, with real tools! Obviously, I wouldn't recommend this activity for a very young set, but with some light supervision and warnings about sharp sheet metal and metals of unknown providence, they can totally handle it (and they are super psyched to get at the guts of everyday objects). I started the morning by setting up our "takeapart station" with an old computer keyboard and three cellular phones. Their mission on the phones was to disassemble the cases, then find and extract the phones' vibrating motors. The keyboard was just for fun, and was a little easier for our younger friends.
The keyboard was a surprising thrill as well. We had lots of good chatter about how it worked, with its double flexible circuit board, tiny processor, and rubber membrane. "Can we keep some keys?" "Sure, if you can figure out a safe way to pop them out!"
We flipped through a great book: Things Come Apart, by Todd McLellan. This is a book of photographs of disassembled electronic and everyday items. There are two photos for each item: one of all the parts in a jumble, and one of all the parts laid out neatly. Enjoy those orderly photos? Check out Things Organized Neatly, my favorite site for things organized by Knolling. What's Knolling? You'll know it when you see it.
We even snuck in a little optical play: there were multiple layers of shielding inside the phones -- some made a double image when you looked through, some made everything purple. One even acted like a periscope and let us sort of see around corners!
Checked the weather again and... nope, still looks like rain. OK, onto our next contingency plan... question circuits! Everyone thought of a multiple choice question and we wired up quiz boards. When you touch the bare wire to the right answer, the LED lights up! Well, it's supposed to light up. Some of us needed to do a little tinkering first. 
And then? Just when I'd given up hope? SUN! Finally. We managed to cram in just one of our solar projects: shirts dyed with Lumi's awesome product, Inkodye. This is a fabric dye that's activated by light. It works just like a cyanotype, though I'm sure the actual chemical process is different. Now, I have to admit, I didn't put this activity through the ringer ahead of time. The dye was a Christmas gift from my husband and it's a bit pricey. I was worried about wasting too much in developing the activity. So we tried a few different techniques. Some kids put leaves and plant pieces under sheets of glass (I raided all the picture frames in the house and borrowed the glass), sort of like this tutorial from SheKnows. This worked great, and those kids ended up with great prints. A couple of kids did something similar, but used cutouts from the newspaper to make shapes, then slid those under a plate of glass. This also worked really well. And the rest of the kids used dry erase marker to make a design or some words right on the glass -- this was a sad trombone failure. BUT the good news is that we have spent all summer at our house learning about how to make a catastrophe into a triumphant moment so everyone that went home with a red square or a blue square is going to brainstorm a way to improve their shirt. (And I think a couple were actually pleased with the shirts just as they were!) So no great tutorial here and no After photos (I think I was just too bummed to bother). But maybe we'll have more to report on this in the future. [Ed. Note: I've seen the "After" versions of some of these shirts and they look great -- Sharpies made great tools for design augmentation.]
Finally, we settled into the shade for a little reading and some journal writing. It was a hot one, and more spontaneous than our usual routine here, but I think everyone ended up having a great time.
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