Plucked from a yard sale, Part 6: Safe journeys, Quizmo and a lion

Today is the end of the journey in documenting 14 items that I picked up for a grand total of $1.25 at a yard sale last weekend. It turned out to be quite a fascinating haul, with far more interesting items than clunkers. The previous entries:

Part 1: Mister Rogers and How to Meet Men
Part 2: Pals Club activity book
Part 3: Painting, baseball and Pac-Man
Part 4: This and that ... and Scott Baio!
Part 5: Is this Dondi the elephant?

Item #12: Teacher's Triptik from 1954

This is a staplebound, 26-page pamphlet published in 1954 by the American Automobile Association for elementary school and junior high teachers.

It was prepared by Luverne Crabtree Walker, the elementary school supervisor for District of Columbia Schools. It offers different levels of tips and guidance for students of different grade levels.

Some excerpts:

• Cover the territory: Get the support of civic groups for the safety of school children. Spread the responsibility for safety over the whole community. Work for better traffic engineering and the safety education of drivers as well as pedestrians.
• A No. 1 necessity is the "triptik"¹ that shows the child's safest route to school. Teachers will want to develop these safest routes just as soon as possible with children. The first day of school is a good time to accent this safety precaution.

• The test of safety education is how children act when they are on their own. Safety education is the "life or death" area of the curriculum. So we cannot take too seriously our responsibility for developing desirable behavior patterns.

The pamphlet encourages traffic safety to be a topic in every school subject.

In language art, students can make a checklist of safety rules. In social studies, they can make a safety map of the neighborhood. In art, they can paint murals on traffic safety. In math, they can interpret safety statistics.

All in all, it's a nice and thorough guide that has plenty of smart ideas that still apply in 2011. (When perhaps we need all the help we can get.)

Item #13: Quizmo: An Educational Lotto

This a fully intact, 62-year-old educational game from Milton Bradley that's in great shape and can easily be used today.

The game is described as follows:

"An educational game played like Lotto² to give practice with addition and subtraction facts in arithmetic. Developed and recommended by prominent educators for grades 2 to 5, this game was created with the purpose of making arithmetic more enjoyable. There are enough cards for the whole class to play at once, or as few as two pupils may play if it is so desired."

Included in the game (see the photo below) are more than 40 double-sided Quizmo cards, calling cards (with one color for addition and another for subtraction), and markers to cover the answer numbers on the cards.

A whole series of Quizmo games are still available today, including an addition and subtraction version that seems nearly identical to this 1949 game.

This version that I picked up at the yard sale would still be great for a classroom or for home-schooling. The outer box is the only thing that shows any wear.

Item #14: "Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules"

I picked up "Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules" at the yard sale because it was in nice shape and the cover looked interesting. It was written by the late Glen Rounds³ and was published in 1976 by Xerox Education Publications.

While I was writing the first entry in this yard-sale series last Saturday, my daughter Sarah sat down next to me and started to look through the items I had purchased. She quickly read through the silly Pac-Man book and then turned her attention to "Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules" (which I hadn't yet had a chance to leaf through).

It grabbed her attention from the start and she read the whole book (40+ pages), taking a break for dinner and then going right back to the tale afterward. She smiled a lot, laughed a few times and then became focused and solemn in the final pages. "That was a good book," she said as she finished and closed it.

And that, of course, made the 10 minutes spent at the yard sale and the $1.25 spent there more than worth it. It's rare for Sarah to read an entire book from start to finish, in essentially one sitting.⁴

Later, Joan and I checked out this book that had captured Sarah's attention. It's a smart tale, sad at times and funny at times. And it has an ending that you might not be prepared for, in terms of its suddenness and violence. But it seemed to make Joan sadder than Sarah, who had no problem with the ending.⁵

So I would have to recommend this book for kids ages 9 to 12. This copy isn't available, though. Sarah said she would like it to go on her bookshelf.

Footnotes
1. "Triptik" later became registered by AAA.
2. By Lotto, they mean Bingo.
3. For more about Rounds, see pages by Children's Literature Network, Pony Mad Booklovers, and Page Books.
4. She tends to be more of a browser, like her father.
5. Joan says the fictional fate of the lion in "Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules" was even sadder than the real-life fate of Dondi the elephant in yesterday's post. Both made her misty-eyed, though.