Children, Art and Technology

After lunch in the Grade Two classroom I was in today, children have a choice of silent reading or drawing. Several help themselves to large sheets of white paper from a drawer. When folded in half the paper perfectly mimics the dimensions of a laptop computer, with its fold-up screen and keyboard. At circle time some of the children show their products. Julius has a Toshiba. His keyboard has the letters in rows in alphabetical order, rather than qwerty, but he does have up-down and right-left arrows to one side. He demonstrates how his laptop folds up. I ask him if his Toshiba costs a lot. He thinks about it for a minute and decides to come clean: “A real one would be about $500. This one? Nothing.”