Last Sunday, as we were walking to the coffee shop for the party, we passed a house that had little kid chalk drawings out front. Of course, I had to do the hopscotch instead of just walking over it.
It made me think about playing outside as a kid. I've always loved chalk. I never really played hopscotch at school, because we didn't have chalk at recess, and it was just painted onto the cement. How boring. There's something much more fun about drawing your own.
Same thing with foursquare. Last summer on our property, we got out the chalk and played a little foursquare in the paved area between the buildings. It was fun.
Then today at work, we got in an order of yo-yos for one of our customers, and me and my boss were trying to see if we could still do it. (Not so well.) Doing yo-yo tricks was really big at one of my gradeschools, but I could never do them. I did have an orange Duncan Butterfly yo-yo, though. I think I still have it somewhere.
I had board games, video games and such too, but there's something about the simplicity of the little things, like using foil pot-pie pans to make mud pies.
What were some of your favorite simple games as a kid?
MzHartz wrote:Last Sunday, as we were walking to the coffee shop for the party, we passed a house that had little kid chalk drawings out front. Of course, I had to do the hopscotch instead of just walking over it.
Yeah you do. You can't walk over it.
My second year in college I lived on a floor that had a checkerboard pattern. They were the perfect hopscotch block size. I took masking tape and followed the blocks and made a hopscotch board. I even added the numbers.
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MzHartz wrote:Last Sunday, as we were walking to the coffee shop for the party, we passed a house that had little kid chalk drawings out front. Of course, I had to do the hopscotch instead of just walking over it.
Yeah you do. You can't walk over it.
My second year in college I lived on a floor that had a checkerboard pattern. They were the perfect hopscotch block size. I took masking tape and followed the blocks and made a hopscotch board. I even added the numbers.
Hide-and-seek was always one of my favorites. Our parents had friends that had four boys and we'd get together with them now and then at night. As us kids got a little older, we started playing hide-and-seek in the dark, just with the one farm yard light. I always enjoyed that.
Hide-and-seek was always one of my favorites. Our parents had friends that had four boys and we'd get together with them now and then at night. As us kids got a little older, we started playing hide-and-seek in the dark, just with the one farm yard light. I always enjoyed that.
We called that Ghosts in the Graveyard. Same thing, just hide-and-seek at night. All the kids from the neighborhood that my grandma lived in would get together to play, so we'd have the whole block to hide in.
When were were in grade school we didn't have much to do outside at recess. At that was available to us was the parking lot. I think there was hopscotch and four square ball. I remember that we played quite a bit of freeze tag and jailbreak.
At home we did a lot of running around the neighborhood. We lived in the back of a circle so we didn't have to worry about much (traffic, strangers). We played a lot of kickball, baseball and soccer in the street. We played hide and seek too. There was also a lot of shooting hoops (at least for me anyway) and bike riding. There was coloring, sometimes we played "school". And of course we spent most of the summer in the pool.
-- Edited by confuzzed on Tuesday 5th of July 2011 08:18:20 AM
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Stop trying to be what you see. Be what you ought to be.
MzHartz wrote:Last Sunday, as we were walking to the coffee shop for the party, we passed a house that had little kid chalk drawings out front. Of course, I had to do the hopscotch instead of just walking over it.
Yeah you do. You can't walk over it.
My second year in college I lived on a floor that had a checkerboard pattern. They were the perfect hopscotch block size. I took masking tape and followed the blocks and made a hopscotch board. I even added the numbers.
That's awesome.
I'm a big fan of acts of random playing.
One of my friends couldn't go by without doing the hopscotch. She always told me she couldn't just walk over it.
My inner child still likes to play. If my nieces are over my house and I take them up the street to the park, you know I have to spend a few minutes swinging.
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Stop trying to be what you see. Be what you ought to be.
Oh yeah, I'm a big fan of swinging, especially if you can find one of those old-style swingsets.
We also did a lot of bike-riding. There were mostly girls in our neighborhood, and most of them weren't tomboys, so I had a hard time getting anyone to even play frisbee with me, not to mention baseball.
Another one we did at school that was fun, we called "King's Base".
Each kid got an old tire that could be placed anywhere they wanted on the playground.
The object of the game was to capture other players who would then team up with you until no one was left and everyone was all on the one person's team. The ultimate goal was to be the one person who captured everyone else.
Your tire was your "base". As long as you were touching your tire, you were safe. There were two ways you could get captured. If you were off your base and got tagged, you were caught. Of the two people off base, the last person to touch his base was the one who would capture the other. Once you tagged someone, you both were then out of play until you both got back to base again (with the person you caught now being on your team/base).
The other way to get captured was to go from your base, around another base, and back to your base three times (without getting tagged), you captured that entire base, and EVERYONE who was on it. So, if you could do that to a base that had 3 people on it, all three would now be on your team. You had to be careful though because as you were out trying to circle someone's base, someone else might be circling yours and you needed to get back and defend it.
MzHartz wrote:There were mostly girls in our neighborhood, and most of them weren't tomboys, so I had a hard time getting anyone to even play frisbee with me, not to mention baseball.
We were all girls too.
__________________
Stop trying to be what you see. Be what you ought to be.
Another one we did at school that was fun, we called "King's Base".
Each kid got an old tire that could be placed anywhere they wanted on the playground.
The object of the game was to capture other players who would then team up with you until no one was left and everyone was all on the one person's team. The ultimate goal was to be the one person who captured everyone else.
Your tire was your "base". As long as you were touching your tire, you were safe. There were two ways you could get captured. If you were off your base and got tagged, you were caught. Of the two people off base, the last person to touch his base was the one who would capture the other. Once you tagged someone, you both were then out of play until you both got back to base again (with the person you caught now being on your team/base).
The other way to get captured was to go from your base, around another base, and back to your base three times (without getting tagged), you captured that entire base, and EVERYONE who was on it. So, if you could do that to a base that had 3 people on it, all three would now be on your team. You had to be careful though because as you were out trying to circle someone's base, someone else might be circling yours and you needed to get back and defend it.
MzHartz wrote:There were mostly girls in our neighborhood, and most of them weren't tomboys, so I had a hard time getting anyone to even play frisbee with me, not to mention baseball.
We were all girls too.
Our girls weren't as fun.
(Edited for bad choice of adjective.)
-- Edited by MzHartz on Tuesday 5th of July 2011 09:25:42 AM
Oh gosh, where to begin! I grew up in the same neighborhood that my parents grew up in. I grew up in the same house that my dad was born in and grew up in; the last house at the end of a dead-end street that ended at the elementary school we went to. There was always loads of stuff to do and lots of kids to play with. Summers were endless -- up and out the door at first light until after dark. We played a lot hide-and-seek -- day and night; ride bikes; shoot hoops; dodge-ball; jacks; kick ball. We lived a couple blocks from a Sears warehouse. One summer we built a fort with empty appliance boxes. My brother and six of the neighborhood kids and I each hauled to our backyard a box and connected them like rooms and cut out windows and doors. We spent many a night that summer "camping out" in our fort. Eventually, near the end of summer, monsoon season was upon us and our fort was flattened to the ground. But that was ok because we then hauled the flattened cardboard to the front of the house cranked up the boom-box and the boys would break-dance in the street
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I was really young, probably about 5, maybe 4, and we lived at an apartment complex. One of the maintenance guys was hot on my mom (which was obvious even to me then), and he gave me an empty refrigerator box. I got to play in it for about an hour until the brother of one of my friends (and he was actually older than us) said it was an outhouse and peed in it. :/
I always loved playing Freeze Tag or acting out Batman or Wonder Woman. I often played a villain though
If I were to go for a cheap toy I would say a balloon. You could entertain me for hours just by playing the game where you don't let the balloon touch the ground.
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"Am I speaking in a language you're not getting here?"
If I were to go for a cheap toy I would say a balloon. You could entertain me for hours just by playing the game where you don't let the balloon touch the ground.
I don't know how old I was, but I was pretty young. I would guess around 5 or 6.
A co-worker of my Mom's stopped by the house to visit my Mom and she brought me a Christmas present (which was surprising since I didn't know her at all). It was a box of sheets of paper cutouts that represented basic grocery items like fruits, vegetables, and basics like flour, bread, etc. I guess it was supposed to be educational because you colored them, then you could pop them out and play with them like you had a store.
Well, it led to YEARS of fun. I quickly got bored with the limited stuff they had so I started making all my own products. Me and my cousins built stores out of lego's and filled the shelves with our products for each other to buy. It was a competition to come up with the coolest looking products to sell. That led us to start creating our own money, we all agreed (four or five of us) to allow only a certain amount of money to be produced per week so that the financial system we created wouldn't get worthless.
Years after we stopped with groceries and stuff we were still using the money system we created to play cards and even to buy stuff from each other. That lasted until I was probably 10 or 11.
So the toy turned out to be VERY educational and quite a bit of fun.
I don't know how old I was, but I was pretty young. I would guess around 5 or 6.
A co-worker of my Mom's stopped by the house to visit my Mom and she brought me a Christmas present (which was surprising since I didn't know her at all). It was a box of sheets of paper cutouts that represented basic grocery items like fruits, vegetables, and basics like flour, bread, etc. I guess it was supposed to be educational because you colored them, then you could pop them out and play with them like you had a store.
Well, it led to YEARS of fun. I quickly got bored with the limited stuff they had so I started making all my own products. Me and my cousins built stores out of lego's and filled the shelves with our products for each other to buy. It was a competition to come up with the coolest looking products to sell. That led us to start creating our own money, we all agreed (four or five of us) to allow only a certain amount of money to be produced per week so that the financial system we created wouldn't get worthless.
Years after we stopped with groceries and stuff we were still using the money system we created to play cards and even to buy stuff from each other. That lasted until I was probably 10 or 11.
So the toy turned out to be VERY educational and quite a bit of fun.
A couple years ago my cousin brought over a little baggie full of the grocery items he found in a box in his attic. It was quite a trip down memory lane. I had a product called CLEAN SWEEP that came in several different scents, you just sprinkled it on the floor and swept it up (each box just showed a broom sweeping up a different colored pile of dirt.
The one item he DIDN'T find though was our infamous "moldy wonder bread". he had made a loaf of wonder bread and it got wet, nobody every wanted it because it looked all weird so it became a running gag to throw it in as a freebie every time somebody shopped at the store that had it.
I don't know if any of y'all every played a game called 7-UP (?)
It required a ball -- we used a tennis ball -- and a wall.
I couldn't remember the exact rules or order, but this is what I found on-line:
Seven-seys: Throw the ball against the wall 7 times and catch it. Six-seys: Throw the ball against the wall, allow it to come back and bounce on the ground once, then catch it. (6 times) Five-seys: Bounce the ball on the ground five times and catch it. Four-seys: Throw the ball against the wall when it comes back, divert it with the palm of your hand, and without catching it, bounce it twice on the ground, then divert it with the palm to bounce off the wall, then catch it. (4 times) Three-seys: Bounce the ball on the ground once then divert it with the palm of your hand against the wall and when it bounces back catch it. (3 times) Two-seys: Throw the ball under one leg against the wall and when it bounces back, catch it. (2 times) One-seys: Throw the ball against the wall, then spin around quickly, and catch it without letting it hit the ground. (once).
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You should fear anything that can bleed for seven days without dying... (as told to Mr. DS on 3-12-10)
