What Is a Phone?

Recently I posted the following on Facebook:

Grandson wanted Papa to make him a phone out of paper. Papa became exasperated not knowing how to do this but eventually followed directions. The result was several smallish pieces of paper stapled together. “How is that a phone?” Papa asked.

Grandson answered, “I’m going to write information on the pages. Then when someone want to know something, they can look it up.”

A phone to my five-year-old grandson, then, is mainly a device for looking up information. When he has a question about sharks, dinosaurs, or outer space, the adults in his life often grab their phones. Phone = Google. The phone he created contained drawings of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops. That’s the kind of info people would be looking for, after all.

I did not add his twin sister’s follow-up activity to my Facebook post, which was like her brother’s but different. She wanted to make a phone, too, and so we stapled together a similar book-like collection of blank paper, roughly the size of a cell phone. On the front page she wanted to write the date and time. (I told her it was 2:15, and she wrote “512.”) The date was June 8, 2026, which we added to the front in some fashion.

On the next page, she asked me to write the numbers 1-40 in small squares. I think this was her best approximation of a phone keypad. On the next page, she wrote the alphabet. On later pages, she drew pictures of her family members.

I surmised that she was creating a representation of her mother’s phone as she experienced it. First comes the lock screen with the date and time. If you’re making a call, you tap on the keypad. I think she knew vaguely that the alphabet appears thereabouts amidst a bunch of numbers. The family portraits approximate her mom’s plethora of photos–images of friends, family, and places.

Both versions seemed fascinating to me. Not brilliant or artistically advanced–I’m not bragging about them. I’m just interested in how integral to their reality phones are and how similarly and differently they view them.

This activity didn’t make me feel old, as one might expect, and it didn’t make me bemoan the omnipresence of cell phones in all of our lives, as I do in other contexts. I just shared my husband’s initial bewilderment with the project and then enjoyed understanding what they were going for. So interesting to see how they both saw it as feasible to make a phone out of paper and at the same time had completely different versions of the same device.