the nitty gritty

We have been trying to find out about how our grandparents played when they were small; we wrote to them asking them all kinds of questions!

Here then, is a little of what we have found out.

Aalian’s grandparents told him that they had quite a lot of toys, including clay dolls and a wooden car.

Anusha’s grandmother’s toys were also mostly made of wood or clay.  She mentioned both clay and wooden dolls, a wooden hobby horse and a cart that was made from wood.  She also told Anusha she had some woollen puppets.

Mechior’s grandfather didn’t have many toys; he had a Rupert Bear (a bear so famous that he even appeared on a postage stamp a few years ago)…..

and a few metal vehicles (that means cars and trucks and things like that).  Melchior’s grandmother, on the other hand, admitted to being quite spoiled when she was a little girl; she said that as well as a bear, she had 29 dolls and that she used to have tea parties with them!

Bianca’s grandma told Bianca about her dolls and about how she had tea parties with hers too.

Emily’s grandma had a china doll as well as a rag doll and she had wooden furniture for the dolls.  She also mentioned something called Meccano.  Emily has promised to find out what that is!

Yanis’ grandpa had a spinning top and some metal cars.  He remembered about ten toys altogether.

Itaru’s grandfather had a teddy bear and some other soft toys.  He had a toy train and a skipping rope and a ball.

Ella’s grandfather had a kite which he made himself using paper and wood.  We wondered if maybe we might be able to make our own kites!  Like Itaru’s grandfather, he had a ball, but unlike him, he didn’t have a bear.

We decided to make a chart showing all the different kinds of toys our grandparents had so that we would be able to compare it with the toys we have. 

Altogether they mentioned 9 different kinds of toy.

Compare that with the chart of (some of) the kinds of toys that we have.

Of course not everyone in the class has all of these toys, but in spite of that you can see that in general we have more toys than or grandparents had.  You can also see that some toys our grandparents had when they were small, like kites and dolls and toy cars, we also have ourselves.

We noticed that not many of the grandparents had teddies and when asked if they had Barbies, all the grandmas replied that no they did not!  I wonder why that was.

And there is something else that does not appear on the grandparents’ chart.  Can anyone spot what it is?  Something we all play with nowadays.

Melchior’s grandma said something interesting.  He had asked  her if she had toys at school.  We were all pretty shocked to hear that the answer to that was ‘No’!  What on earth would they have done during wet playtimes?