For the Children: Kickin' It Old School

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Kickin' It Old School

Have you ever been doing the rhyming chant "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" and get to the part where "Mama calls the doctor" and you're making the dialing of the phone motion, then realize the kids don't have any idea why you are doing that? I got to where I would only do the phone up to the ear motion during it.

Last week my new friend, Jackie over at Happy Hooligans posted an amazing Wish List that has almost everything you could think of on it. I modified the list to meet the needs of my class and sent it out to my staff and families. My amazing Instructional Assistant, Ms. Annie informed me she had a rotary phone and a typewriter she could bring into the class and today she DID!

First she introduced it to them showing them how to put the
paper in, how to type on the keys, and how to press the
return button to go down to the next line.

Then they began finding the letters in their own names.

It wasn't long before they were able to put the paper in
the typewriter for themselves.

This is some of the results of their hard work.

Our next step is to find a manual typewriter so they can see the effort it took to put the letters onto the page.

We then moved on to her rotary phone. One child exclaimed, "What is that?" Most had never seen one. So Ms. Annie began showing them how you would make a call on it. Needless to say, they were amazed at how long you had to wait between dialing each number or maybe I should say fascinated. She explained how it plugged into the wall and you had to stay by it and not move around the house like we now can with a cordless phone. The color cracks me up. I remember when we got our first rotary phone and my Dad bringing the card with all the pastel colors on it for us to choose. You don't find many pastel phones anymore.

We did some other cool stuff that wasn't nearly as retro, but still very fun. We pulled out the marble maze for the first time this year and the kids were mesmerized by it.

Here we go!!

Watching the marble travel through the maze.

I love the clinking sound it makes as it goes through this
part of the maze.

Another hit at our place today was yarn painting. Another new friend, Roopa just pinned to Pinterest their latest adventures in yarn painting and it was a great reminder of an activity we haven't done yet this year. The kids got some phenomenal results.

Paper pre-folded then opened back up. Section of yarn pulled
through multiple colors of paint and placed inside. Paper
refolded and beautiful images emerge.