Genes in a Bottle on the cheap

Commercial supply stores have kits that they are happy to sell you for $100 + per class. There's an interesting one called, "genes in a bottle" where you extract your DNA and place it in a microcentrifuge tube tied to colourful thread which you can wear around your neck.

If you wanted to do this at home, there is "shot glass DNA extraction" those uses over-proof rum and other household materials. For the classroom, though, I found an excellent method at about.com: biology. Here’s the link:
http://biology.about.com/library/howto/htdnaextracthum.htm

The method is rated as simple and only takes 15 minutes. The materials are easy to find: small plastic cups (like a medicine cup for rinsing your mouth), small beakers, test tubes with stoppers, distilled water, salt, liquid dish detergent and rubbing alcohol (95% chilled alcohol could be used if that was more plentiful).
Other advantages to this method are that you don’t have to put in an order and wait for it.
If you want to take the extraction a step further so that students can proudly wear their DNA, it can be spooled into an Eppendorf tube which can be tied with colourful thread. These microcentrifuge tubes can be purchased for about $20 for a package of 500. That’s "Cents-ible Science"!