Playground games & Kiddy Rhymes

looksee · 15-04-2011 9:04am #1

Does anyone remember when games were 'seasonal'. I can't remember exactly what the seasons were but they involved skipping, fivestones (jacks), fancy ball games where you bounced two balls off a wall in complicated patterns, hopscotch, whip and top, group games like 'the big ship sails' and circle games, and chain tag. Some of those were definitely girls' games, like two ball and skipping. The boys played marbles and a variation on pitch and toss. Easter seemed to be a big changeover date.

Also the choosing rites for teams - one potato, two potato etc. There is an entire folklore to skipping chants.

OldGoat · 15-04-2011 9:09am

"whip and top"?

EDIT: /Googles
Oh, spinning tops. Never had one. Never had a teddy bear either but thats another story.

Rubecula · 15-04-2011 3:13pm

Tag (or Tick as we called it back then) was the first playground game I played if memory serves me correctly... which it never does these days.

Ball Tick was another early one, as was Kissy Chase. (I always looked forward to that one for some reason)

Banjara · 15-04-2011 6:31pm

Lol ...... Kiss Chase!! I remember some girls being pissed off 'cos no matter how slowly they ran, they never got caught!!:D

Other ones that come to mind ..... 'What's the time Mr Wolf', leapfrog, marbles, conkers, and a potentially quite violent game in which one team had to run across the playground without getting caught by someone in the other team which also seemed to consist of the hardest kids ..... many a scraped knee and scab gained during this activity. Talking of scabs, some kids in my class had rather unpleasant means of disposing of picked scabs ..... ugh!!

Oryx · 15-04-2011 7:43pm

We played elastics when I was little. A loop of elastic bands held by two girls (only girls played this) which you had to jump in a particular pattern. We called tag tig, and every group of kids in our town had their own secret fort somewhere.

OldGoat · 15-04-2011 8:23pm

Anyone else ever make ice tracks down the centre of the road during winters?

Mint Sauce · 15-04-2011 11:04pm

(British) Bulldog and other various versions of tag, and sting ball, a game similar to the one in the dodgeball movie.

Mollywolly · 17-04-2011 9:21pm

Oryx wrote: »

We played elastics when I was little. A loop of elastic bands held by two girls (only girls played this) which you had to jump in a particular pattern.

I remember this one! I think it was called french skipping and it started with the elastic around the ankles and it gradually went higher. I was spectacularly cr@p at this game and could only ever manage the first round!

Other ones I remember were Cat's Cradle, Statues and as for Kiss-chase... Lucky me went to a mixed school where girls and boys played it and I always went after the same boy. Wonder where he is now?

looksee · 18-04-2011 1:08pm

Lol, any game that needed a name just stick French or Chinese or Dutch on the front of it!

There was a 'weaving in and out of a circle' one - I cant remember the actual game, which went to the tune of 'in and out the dusty windows (or bluebells?)'. I am pretty sure it was not dusty windows when it started, but I have no idea what it might have been.

Also 'The big ship sails on the ally ally oh...on the first day of September'. One person made an arch against a wall and everyone threaded through it and ended up in a chain with crossed arms - again I can't remember the end but no doubt it ended up with at least a couple of people on the ground with scraped knees.

Bluebells! Just found this http://www.playgroundfun.org.uk/GameRules.aspx?gameID=61

stovelid · 18-04-2011 2:48pm

Kerbs or paths: where you faced each other on either kerb and tried to bounce a football back ff the kerb and into your hands.

Barsy: this is what we called it when I was a kid. Same principle really - you stood one either side of a goal and tried to chip the ball so it would hit the crossbar and bounce back.

Cannonball run: one we made up where somebody had to run along beside a wall and we shot the ball at them to try and hit them.

Ralivo?: at least that's how we pronounced it. Two teams: one in charge of the 'prison' which was a wall and they chased the other team around the playground and when 'tipped', they had to stand at the wall but could be freed if you ran and tipped the wall and shouted Ralivo before the guarding team could stop you.

Pile on: not a game as much as a melee where one person fell or was thrown on the ground and everybody jumped on them (and on and on until there was a huge pile of you) shouting pile-on, pile-on.

poppyvalley · 18-04-2011 7:41pm

We used to have a yoke called a "maypole"About 8 of us would catch a bar attached by a rope to the central maypole. In turn, one would stand still while the others would move around the maypole. Then the one that was standing would be propelled at break neck speed flying at right angle round above the others. The thing was not to let go of the bar!

Mint Sauce · 19-04-2011 9:33am

stovelid wrote: »

Kerbs or paths: where you faced each other on either kerb and tried to bounce a football back ff the kerb and into your hands.

Barsy: this is what we called it when I was a kid. Same principle really - you stood one either side of a goal and tried to chip the ball so it would hit the crossbar and bounce back.

Cannonball run: one we made up where somebody had to run along beside a wall and we shot the ball at them to try and hit them.

Ralivo?: at least that's how we pronounced it. Two teams: one in charge of the 'prison' which was a wall and they chased the other team around the playground and when 'tipped', they had to stand at the wall but could be freed if you ran and tipped the wall and shouted Ralivo before the guarding team could stop you.

Pile on: not a game as much as a melee where one person fell or was thrown on the ground and everybody jumped on them (and on and on until there was a huge pile of you) shouting pile-on, pile-on.

Did you go to school in london? Sounds a bit like our playgound, different names though.

stovelid · 19-04-2011 12:57pm

irish-stew wrote: »

Did you go to school in london? Sounds a bit like our playgound, different names though.

Actually I went to school in Manchester when I was a kid until we moved to Dublin. We said Kerbs instead of Paths there. Barsy was from there but the others were from here. I'm sure their just universal games - especially the ones that involve blasting other kids with footballs or squashing them.

Mint Sauce · 19-04-2011 2:07pm

We used to play a more violent version of war. The regular version had two teams, if someone pointed their gun at you (bascally your hand in the shape of gun) and said bang, you had to lie down for a count of ten. If whole of oposing team were lieing down at same time, then your team won. The violent version mimiced you stabing someone, and then lieing on top of them for a count of ten, and a further ten count before you (the person stabed) could get up again. Looking back it was just a legitament reason to punch someone.

Patball, played by two people. Very similar to handball but you also had to make the ball bounce of the ground between your hand and tha wall. Points were won if you oponent failed to bounce the ball of the gound on to the wall or if failed to return the ball after it bouncing off the gound no more than once after hitting the wall. First to 5 wins the game, first to two games won the match.

Round the world patball. Similar to above, but started off with 3 plus people. Lose one point and you were out of the game straight away, untill there was only two people left, then first to 5 points won.

Football in junior school the whole time I was there, was always always class 7 v the rest (of the juniors). Junior school consisted of 4 classes, which usally meant you had to wait 3 to 4 years before you were on a winning side.

Most of these games including those in my last post were played in junior classes of primary school, ocassionally one of the infants would stray into our playground and usally got accidently flattened by one of our more boisterous games. Barr patball which was played in secondary school.

In infants it got no more exciting than tag. With another version including not being allowed to step on the lines between the paving, meaning the bogey man tagged you.

anewme · 24-04-2011 10:58am

stovelid wrote: »

Kerbs or paths: where you faced each other on either kerb and tried to bounce a football back ff the kerb and into your hands.

Ralivo?: at least that's how we pronounced it. Two teams: one in charge of the 'prison' which was a wall and they chased the other team around the playground and when 'tipped', they had to stand at the wall but could be freed if you ran and tipped the wall and shouted Ralivo before the guarding team could stop you.
.

Loved Kerbs.

We had a game which we called sticky relivio - which was kind of the same thing that you called ralivo.

Red Rover - Red Rover, Red Rover we call Johnny over.......

There was another game we called it Plaineyio= where the person who was "on" threw a tennis ball backwards over their head and those behind had to scurry to catch it and hide it somewhere on their person. When the ball was suitably hidden, the group sang "plaineyio who has the ball, is he big or his he small, is he fat or is he thin, or is he hit with a rolling pin. The person then quizzed everyone "splits" etc to see if they could guess who had the ball.

Bulldog - Bulldogs charge!!

There was another game "Giant Steps".....Paddy, you take 2 baby steps (someone you did not like)........John, take a train to london.......

Also did the elastics thing - we just called it elastics - "Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, inside outside inside, scales, inside outside, across the sea and back again, make a gun and shoot yourself, outside, across the sea, make a diamond, one, two three!"

Other things I remember playing were "Swingball" and a "Mr. Turtle Pool" here's the add from 1977 - I still remember all the words.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umVK25mrVRg

Rubecula · 25-04-2011 12:25am

Ralivo we called Elallio, but exactly the same game.

Mint Sauce · 27-04-2011 8:38am

Was reading that alot of schools tried baning Bulldog. I thought it was just our school.

franc 91 · 29-01-2012 10:11pm

This is a subject that I've been interested in for quite a while - you might like to have a look at these books, though you'd probably only find them in second-hand bookshops -
Moon Penny (Ossian) ISBN 0 946005 30 3 compiled by Bill Meek
All in! All in! (Folklore Studies) ISBN 0 901120 85 5 compiled by Eilis Brady
and Appletree Press in Belfast have re-edited Boys and Girls Come Out to Play - Irish Singing Games ISBN 978 1 84758 096 2 compiled by Maurice Leyden.
Meanwhile I'm still looking for traditional children's games that they used to play as Gaeilge in the Gaeltacht - what surprises me is that in 1937, I think it was, there was a project across Ireland where schoolchildren were asked to write down what they knew about local stories and folklore. Obviously they asked their grandparents and others around them and I think they also described the games they played. Apparently nobody has thought fit to publish a book about that - and it's all still there in the Archives.

Jellybaby1 · 30-01-2012 2:18am

Have you tried contacting the RTE archives? Cathal O'Shannon, Frank Hall, the Radharc series or others might have covered childrens' lives.

P.S. Don't forget 'The Skewel around the Corner' with Paddy Crosby, might provide some insights, if they still have those recordings. A lot were taped over.

We used to play One Potato, Two Potato which I didn't like very much because some kids really punched your hands with force and it was pretty painful. But I mainly skipped, hop-scotched, and climbed walls 'cos I was a tomboy, or a wannabe tomboy at least!

looksee · 30-01-2012 10:47am

Another interesting thing was the shout you used for 'time out'. If you wanted a break for a couple of seconds you had to shout the appropriate local call.

Two I remember were 'pax' and 'croggies'. What was interesting was that pax was the RC latin 'peace', and 'croggies' was a corruption of 'cross keys' - along with the crossed fingers of one hand held up - the symbol of the Pope's flag. We used croggies in south yorkshire and pax in Leicester. Since neither place was noticeably Catholic, these calls had survived for a good number of years, being passed down from one generation of children to the next.

Jellybaby1 · 30-01-2012 3:21pm

Rubecula wrote: »

Ralivo we called Elallio, but exactly the same game.

In our neck of the woods it would have been 'Relieve-ee-i-o, who has the ball?"

To be honest, I really have a bad memory so I can only remember bits and pieces. O & O's more senior than I probably have sharper memories doubtlessly undulled by our overdoses of TV from the 60's.

JuliusCaesar · 30-01-2012 9:03pm

franc 91 wrote: »

Meanwhile I'm still looking for traditional children's games that they used to play as Gaeilge in the Gaeltacht - what surprises me is that in 1937, I think it was, there was a project across Ireland where schoolchildren were asked to write down what they knew about local stories and folklore. Obviously they asked their grandparents and others around them and I think they also described the games they played. Apparently nobody has thought fit to publish a book about that - and it's all still there in the Archives.

I was in the museum in Kiltimagh in Mayo and they had the actual copybooks there that the kids wrote in. I think the School of Folklore in UCD had collected them all and then returned the originals to the places after they had digitised the collection. The kids had amazingly good handwriting!

(We called it Relievee-eye-oh - I figured because you could 'relieve' all the prisoners by touching them. And hopscotch we called skipping too - we used a shoe-polish tin to kick forward, usually filled with stones or earth to make it a little heavier. Ah, French skipping! I wasn't great at it, but I just LOVED real skipping and was pretty good at it. And in Dublin we didn't shout Pax, we shouted TAX! But it meant the same thing. Now what was the famous book on children's game in the UK and here? - it was Iona & Peter Opie, back in the '50s who collected games from kids everywhere - the Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.)

the_syco · 30-01-2012 9:22pm

anewme wrote: »

Bulldog - Bulldogs charge!!

Remember playing "trip bulldog" on the "grass" part of the playground.

It was banned.

Normal bulldog was also banned, so instead of going from one side of the grass part to the other side of the grass part, we'd go from one side of the playground to the other side of the playground. The people in the way (2nd class to 6th class I think it was) were just obstacles to be avoided :pac:

=-=

Kerbs was good, esp with all the various different tricks (throwing the ball one handed behind your back whilst standing on one leg, to bounce the ball off the kerb, and then catch the ball after it had bounced off the kerb before it hit the ground again, for example).

=-=

Also, 21 (I think it was called). You count to 21, and everyone hides. You then say where they were hiding (or running towards the pole) whilst one hand was on the central pole. One trick was to just go home without anyone seeing you go, and everyone thinking you were in some awesome place :pac:

the_syco · 30-01-2012 9:28pm

franc 91 wrote: »

what surprises me is that in 1937, I think it was, there was a project across Ireland where schoolchildren were asked to write down what they knew about local stories and folklore.

Thanks for the year. With it, I found this:

http://rian.ie/en/item/view/43203.html

This paper reports on the Folklore School Games project which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) series of demonstrator research projects. The project, which was inspired by the example of the 1937-38 Schools’ Scheme (a comprehensive survey of folklore, including games, collected from schoolchildren throughout Ireland which is held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD), was undertaken from October to December 2009 and collected contemporary accounts from children of games they play. The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials but could also present material in new ways and suggest themes for further research. This project does so by presenting outputs of the research as a digital collection of image and audio files, and specifically links the 2009 project with the earlier work by including scanned extracts relating to children’s games from the 1937-38 scheme. The paper gives an overview of the project aims, details the planning and conduct of the fieldwork, reports on the material collected and digitised, and concludes by suggesting ways in which this research could be further developed.

http://irserver.ucd.ie/dspace/bitstream/10197/2502/1/ResearchPaper_%20FolkloreSchoolGames.pdf

franc 91 · 30-01-2012 9:32pm

Just to reply to JuliusCaesar, did you see the RTE television programme O Bhéal go Béal about this project and how they found former pupils in the school at Ballyvourny who had participated in it? It's now on YouTube in three episodes under the title Folklore and Local History. (I wish RTE would have had the sense to put it on sale as a DVD with the transcripts - it's pure gold)

JuliusCaesar · 31-01-2012 10:42am

Thanks Franc. (Off topic just for a mo: RTE don't seem to have any sense. 1. That Sunday Miscellany should be a CD and not a book - it was made to be heard, not read. 2.The Francis MacManus Short Story competition...what the hell do they do with the stories afterwards? Lose them? There was a hilarious one called, iirc, A Picnic in Mayo (about a Dublin family's disasterous holiday in lashing rain) but they didn't keep the tapes - and that would have been mid-90s, so not so long ago. Don't suppose it's on YouTube, being radio

franc 91 · 31-01-2012 11:28am

Still off topic (sorry about that) but there is an audio archive on RTE for that short story competition that goes back to 2005 and you never know if you ask around somebody somewhere might have recorded earlier programmes. I'm still kicking myself for not recording The Archive Hour on BBC Radio 4 when they went to Dublin and did an amazing programme about the traditions of storytelling - again they went to the Archives - has any one got that, I wonder - again it's pure gold.

Jellybaby1 · 31-01-2012 12:37pm

Came across this recently and just throwing it into the hat for anyone interested. Its a voluntary run arts centre where storytelling is performed by guests and also they have an open mic. for the audience to participate.

http://www.milkandcookiestories.com/

rich.d.berry · 03-02-2012 11:00am

I remember playing a game we called King Stingers. It was a group game, with no limit to the number of participants, which entailed the "on" player trying to hit the other players with a tennis ball. The "on" player may not run and chase any of the others while carrying the ball but he may roll the ball ahead in order to narrow the distance and then pick it up and throw when in range.

As a player is tagged, that player then becomes "on" and collaborates with the other "on" players by passing the ball to each other. The other players may defend themselves by striking the ball with a closed fist. An open hand strike or catching the ball counted as a tag.

As more players are tagged the intensity of the game escalates as the players who are being chased find it increasingly difficult to find a safe zone. The game ends with the last man standing, who then becomes the "on" player when a new game is started.

Depending on the number of participants we used to limit the play area to a portion of the football pitch, usually half. Stepping outside of the area of play would count as a tag.

This game, though not strictly seasonal, would have seasons of popularity when practically everyone joined in and then would fall out of favour with perhaps a handful of die-hards continuing to play in the less popular periods.

franc 91 · 03-02-2012 11:14am

Here's another question about playground games - there's usually some kind of ritual way of saying 'I'm out of the game' or 'I'm protected' - what is said and the gesture or handsign made varies enormously from place to place. One example is saying 'flixxie' and putting your two hands up, palms facing the other children and crossing your index and big fingers on both hands. Here in France they put their two thumbs up and say (naturellement) - 'pouces!'
And another question, while I'm about it - what names did you have for each finger? Sammy Thumb or Thumbkin? Peter Pointer, Bobby Big, Ruby Ring, Tiny Tim - there must be quite a few variations of those as well.

rich.d.berry · 03-02-2012 11:20am

franc 91 wrote: »

And another question, while I'm about it - what names did you have for each finger? Sammy Thumb or Thumbkin? Peter Pointer, Bobby Big, Ruby Ring, Tiny Tim - there must be quite a few variations of those as well.

We referred to our little finger as our pinkie.

Playground games & Kiddy Rhymes

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