Vintage Clothes

I love vintage clothes.  Unfortunately, a girl cannot dress in vintage alone (or at least, a girl on my budget can't).  Sadly, the recent interest in wearing vintage clothing and the growth of reselling websites like etsy and eBay have made it difficult to both find and afford vintage clothing.  However, there are still deals to be had when it comes to finding vintage clothing at thrift stores.  Some thrift stores occasionally offer 50% off clothing days in order to empty their overflowing clothes racks.  These sales are a great opportunity to snatch up vintage clothing at more than affordable prices.  My favorite vintage coat, pictured below, was purchased for a steal during a recent 50% off clothing sale.

1960s or 1970s Bullock's Wilshire Coat (click here to see some beautiful pictures of the Bullocks Wilshire Building) 

One of my professors recently conducted a sample lesson in which he taught adjectives and adjective order using images of vintage clothing.  This lesson was amazing, not just because it was about vintage clothes, but because of how fun it was to actually describe vintage clothes.  It was really surprising to see how clothes that one person would describe as "pretty," another person would describe as "ugly."  There were even times when some of us tried to sway our classmates into thinking that clothes they considered to be "cool" were actually "uncool" using the adjectives being taught in the lesson.

In light of my aim to use thrift store finds in my future lessons, this lesson could be adapted to use thrift store realia by simply using actual vintage clothing instead of pictures of vintage clothing.  By making this switch, the students could actually see and feel the clothes from the different decades for themselves.  This would enable the introduction of a whole new class of adjectives that could not have been taught in the previous lesson: touch adjectives.  Students could describe wool sweaters from the 50s as "itchy" or polyester from the 70s as "stiff."  Thus, the addition of actual vintage clothing could improve an already amazing lesson.

On a completely unrelated note, I took a break from working on my final projects today (almost done!) to take a walk over to my local thrift store.  Here is what I purchased:

Vintage Game and Shelf

There are actually two shelves and they are so cute! For only $5 for both shelves I just couldn't turn them down ;)  Above the shelf is a game called "kwazy quilt" that I purchased to use in my future ESL tutoring classes.  To play the game, you take apart the pieces of the "quilt" and try to fit the pieces back together again.  Can anyone out there think of a way to use this game in an ESL context?  Any ideas are much appreciated!