STL Free For All

One of the administrators at M.’s school told me recently that they were reconsidering the way they organize recess for the elementary school students — or, rather, the way they simply release the kids to the outdoors to play. She said the kids don’t seem to know what to do with themselves; it seems that their limited experience with unstructured free time results in difficulty organizing playground games.

Part of it, I suppose, is that these kids are in a fairly new school and don’t have the benefit of games being passed down to them through generations of students. But it’s also a commentary on the rarity of loosely supervised outdoor time in general. And then I got to thinking about the roving band of 8- and 9-year-olds in my neighborhood. They’re kids who live here, whose names and parents everyone knows (and M. wants more than anything to be part of the clique. At nearly 5, he’s much too young, of course, and their casual exclusion of him is totally justified — if painful for him!) But I find myself watching them from my office window so I can tell their parents if they’re getting into trouble, which I guess is old-fashioned of me. Mostly, though, I see them riding bikes around the block or playing pick-up kickball in the empty lots across the alley from our house. Exactly the harmless stuff an expert in child development might want them to be doing.

M.’s school might be going against the national trend in even thinking of promoting playground games; over the past few years, many districts have banned everything from tag to soccer to recess itself on safety grounds. It makes me wonder whether the Wii’s Playground Games virtual world is what this world is coming to!

In pondering all of this over the past few days, I’ve made some resolutions. I’m going to teach M. and his friends (the neighborhood has its own clique his age, they just can’t wander semi-unsupervised yet) some playground games from back in my day 30 years ago, like Colored Eggs (where a “witch” chases kids based on guessing colors from a crayon box, one of my all-time favorite games from third grade) and Circle Tag and Red Light/Green Light and Simon Says and Red Rover and maybe even Four Square. I will probably not teach him Kiss or Kill, just because I’m too old to roughhouse like that and would always choose kiss! Recess might not be around then, but perhaps he can introduce those games when he and his friends are finally old enough to roam the neighborhood on their own.

If anyone has any good games to suggest, e-mail me or comment with them. And if you want to take a trip down memory lane to your own gradeschool days, here are some sites where you can do that:

Kids Games

Wikipedia list of traditional children’s games (which they call street culture)

Suite 101’s Outdoor Games for Kids

Sports4Kids’s playground games how-to manual