Oakland Elementary School fourth-graders stepped back in time Thursday, among other things learning that obtaining paper in the olden days was much harder than ducking out to OfficeMax.

Colonial Day was the students’ chance to put many social studies Standards of Learning into practice, art teacher Jodie Linkous said, adding that over the course of the year, each grade gets its own special, themed day with the same objective.

Linkous had her students make paper by tearing up tissues and toilet paper into an empty tennis ball container, topping it off with water, running the concoction through a blender, pressing the pulp into a mold and deckling with a sponge.

It loosely followed what folks in colonial times would have done, Linkous said. “(But) they would actually have used rags and soaked them for a really long time,” she added.

Some fourth-graders got extra creative by adding dried flowers or little pieces of string to their homemade paper, she said.

“The funny thing was, they thought this was hard to do; imagine back in colonial times without a blender and all this stuff,” Linkous added.

Elsewhere around the school Thursday, fourth-graders played colonial games in the gym, danced jigs to the Virginia reel folk dance in the music room, and heard about and tasted stone soup, which is actually vegetable soup, in the library, where they also sipped apple cider.

“I think it brings what they are learning in their social studies classrooms to life for them,” Linkous said.

“Even though they learn the facts, they may not totally understand how things were so different; it takes them out of the period they are in and takes them back a little bit.”

Many students’ parents came to the school to help out, including Aiden Wall’s mom Kathleen Wall, who went to Oakland Elementary herself.

“I just think it’s so important to get involved and keep the kids excited,” Kathleen Wall said.

Aiden said it was interesting to learn how much harder things were in colonial times compared with today. “You couldn’t just go to OfficeMax and buy it (paper),” he observed.

Classmate Amileon Pierce said she enjoyed “mushing” the paper by running it through the blender.

Things were much harder back then, she added.