Since when has Year 7 literacy homework...

[seeker]

.....involve antiquing paper with teabags!

(Not complaining, btw - much more fun than the stuff I remember doing!)

LOL. I've just set a HW for my Y8s that involved this. They had to write a letter home from the trenches and I happened to mention that if they wanted it to seem like an authentic momento from that time they could 'age' the paper with tea or coffee. One girl came in with a blackened scrap of something - she'd left the paper in the oven too long and it had burned. When I asked her what her mum had said she casually replied 'Oh I was on my own, everyone else was out.' !!!

So if I don't post again, I'll be in prison for inciting arson!

Dd's is a diary of the last three days of Ophelia's life. You can imagine the flurry of pressed flowers, pink ribbons and artfully produced tear stains this is producing in a 12 year old girl!

I put my foot down about singeing the edges in a candle flame. Glad I did, now I've ready your post. Or perhaps I should have encouraged it, then you would have had someone to chat to in prison!

I remember doing this at secondary school. I soaked the paper in grease from the roast to make it look like parchment. Then when I'd finished doing the writing, I decided to just scorch the edges with a match.

Bad idea.

pmsl at the thought of GregorSamsa with no eyelashes or eyebrows aged 13

(great name by the way!)

I've been doing the tea-bag thing with year 1 this week.

My fingers are still stained and make me look like I'm a real heavy smoker

Moomin, that's pretty much what happened. Suffice it to say I needed a trip to the hairdresser.

'tis frogs btw, in my new incarnation!

We do that quite often with yr 7 !!
Last year one lad used soy sauce instead - his treasure map didn't half pong!!

Well, she has antiqued her paper, drawn a posy oif wild flowers, made her cover, founs some ribbon - now all she has to do is actually write the homework!!

I've done this in Science classes before, when the children are writing letters to or from a famous scientist about their discovery. It helps focus their minds on the historical significance and about scientific method.

The teabag bit is easy, but singing the edges can sometimes result in the whole thing going up in flames! Good fun though.

you can make it look more aged by flicking damp coffee beans for age spots

not beans- granules

I remember making a treasure map like that when I was about 8. Good fun.

we do it at school
it is when they use coffee that the place begins to stink!

I've got a bag full of Y8 HW to mark that stinks of coffee and burnt paper. Haven't got round to marking it yet for some reason....

After this thread, I'm laughing about dd, who, yesterday got someone to burn her poster for Romeo & Juliet and then she daubed it with a teabag. I made her use a cheapo Lipton's one, not my Earl Grey ones. Dd is very taken about the grease idea....

I remember doing this with DS1 last year. I was a bit at first but then he and I loved it.

I've since done it in the course of making each DS a treasure-location poem for an easter egg hunt.

("One morning Gregor Samsa woke up and found that he was no longer an enormous frog...")

i remember doing this with the twins

then we grilled it - for that extra special "really old shit" look

I once had a pupil antique something using soy sauce, it stunk her bag and my room out!

I didn't even know dd wanted it to look Ye Olde Worlde. We were out for a meal with friends last night and she'd had to take her homework (for reasons too complicated to explain here) there to finish it. Next thing I knew, she and her friend had asked someone smoking to char it with his lighter!!

Lol at soy sauce and other kitchen ingredients being used.