Oh! Canada.
In the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of these Oh! Canada kits were distributed to schools across the land by the Commissioner of Official Languages.
It was a surprisingly effective bid to create a sense of Canadian-ness in kids by showing them the whole Great Span of our Nation and to show them that learning the Other Official Language (depending on where you lived) was actually fun. The kit included a board game about travelling across Canada, a 45rpm record that taught basic French-English vocabulary, and the Oh! Canada comic book (drawn by Madeline Kronby, who readers of a certain age will remember from the beloved CBC kids show Chez Helene).
The comic book followed the adventures of a bunch of kids and teens who accidentally end up flying across Canada in an all-terrain bathtub (at one point, it even went underwater) made by a crazy inventor uncle. They went from the East Coast to the West Coast and even up North, discovering regional differences and learning English and French along the way. (I seem to remember the oldest teenage girl of the group discovering romance in Montreal…)
If you have one of these stashed away or extras for sale…let me know.
August 13, 2003 1:26 PM
