It’s Zum Zum Time
ABOUT ZUM-ZUM
Zum-Zum Museum is an interactive children’s micro-museum targeted to newborn children up to children who are 12 years old. Its main mission as a social enterprise is to present an exploratory and creative learning environment that speaks to heritage phenomena of Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean. As one of the few children’s museums in the region, its focus on Caribbean historical and cultural phenomena helps to build a culturally and creatively confident Caribbean child.
Telephone Times
Zum-Zum’s current exhibition is called Tech Times in the Tropics, and it’s all about old gadgets that were found in homes in Trinidad and Tobago from the 1940s onward. Since museums are closed because of COVID, there’s a 360 virtual version that you can access here: https://yellar360.com/360/trinidad/business/zumzum/
In this Zum-Zum segment of the Dairy Dairy Milky Magic Day Camp, we look at one of those gadgets – the telephone! Bet you didn’t know that the telephone goes back to the 1800s. To put it simply, the telephone makes communication across distance much easier. Telephone science is really simple: it takes your voice, which is a series of sound waves, and transports them to someone’s ear so that they can hear what you’ve said. Long ago, in Trinidad and Tobago, and all around the world, children would make “pretend” phones out of cans or cups that were attached by a single piece of twine. So that’s what we’re going to do – we’re going to make a basic telephone with cups and twine. Then we’ll have some fun with what we call, “eco-friendly” phones – that may or may not actually work!
What you need to participate:
- For the basic telephone
- Two clean plastic cups
- Some twine (preferably with natural fibres)
- A device to make a hole in the cup (ice-pick, nail, etc.). Make sure an adult helps you with these items)
- For the “eco-phone”
- Some clean, used cardboard
- A marker
- Scissors
- Glue
Head over to our Facebook Page to see more on this.
