Time travel

There always seems to be a revival of one era or another from the past few decades. With retro styles all the rage at the moment, what better time to introduce a new theme focusing on a decade from the recent past.

My out-of-school club decided to do just that with a 1980s day, since the staff had so much to contribute from this decade - this turned out to be crucial, since the resources we needed were varied and not all can be bought in the shops.

We started with a thought-storming session. For once it was necessary for the adults to take more of a lead than the children, since although they had some ideas about the kinds of things they'd like to explore, the pop music of the day for instance, their suggestions were somewhat limited by a lack of knowledge about the time. For a fleeting moment we wondered if perhaps the theme would fail to grab the children, but as the staff started to reminisce, the children began to hang on to their words. We realised that what the children were most interested in was a taste of ordinary real life in the 1980s, and the real people who had experienced it.