January & February 2022

A local car club brought twelve 1950s and 60s cars over to drive the kids on our neighborhood Route 66 journey. We picked some of the sights a person might see when traveling on Route 66. 

The kids used a homemade travel brochure to read about each sight. The brochure also pointed out connections to the children’s movie “Cars” to solidify some of these places in their head. Later in the day, at a center, we pulled out a map to identify where each location was.

Back at the house, we had a variety of centers about the 1950s. A friend of Loving to Learn donated these story book dolls for the children to play with at our 1950s fun center, where the kids played with toys and games of the era.

We had a center on Hollywood and Disney, where the kids made their own Hollywood Walk of Fame. They also discussed McCarthyism and manifestations of that tendency today.

We had a center about homes of the 1950s. In this center, we addressed the difference between the economies that the soldiers from WWII were coming home to in the U.S. vs. those encountered abroad. We talked about command economies vs. market economies. There were many good and bad effects of the creation of suburbs. Some people groups were left out of the opportunity to accumulate wealth, which comes to a head in the 1960s. Some people groups were, however, much more assimilated in the 1950s than they were at the turn of the century. More appliances, in combination women being used to working outside the home, was setting the stage for feminism in the 1970s. Many different kinds of modern homes were shown. The kids got to create their dream home.

We learned some dances from this era like the Bunny Hop and the Hand Jive.

The girls made their own poodle skirts.

One night we took all of the furniture out to the living room and turned the house into a diner. The kitchen became a soda fountain shop and danced in the living room to the tunes of the 1950s.