What were your favorite games as a child? What did you like to do with your classmates or the neighborhood kids? How did that affect the person you grew to become?
During recess we played hide-and-seek tag where the base would be the wall of the school and the most popular hiding place was in the big play-scape because of the many caverns it had. The school slowly started taking elements off of it, such as the tube slide, fire pole, and tire ladder and eventually boarded up the entire ground level due to visibility issues. They were trying to make it "safer" and hence, less fun.
We played airplane: where we would swing on the swings and pretend like we were flying to faraway places, mostly Disneyworld, and then jumped off to land. The playground monitors didn't like when we did this, so we would make it a game to do it when they weren't looking.
During gym my favorite games were tv tag, where you would have to say a tv show just before getting tagged to remain safe. Another class favorite from 1st-8th grade was Octopus, where one or two people were "it" and everyone would stay on one side of the gym. If you were wearing a color they called, you were allowed to run to safety to the other side, trying not to get tagged. If you got tagged you had to stay where you got tagged and try to tag other people as they ran by, like seaweed. I hated this game when I was wearing a monochrome outfit, which is probably why I wore my huge knit colorful sweater A LOT. I wonder if I still have that thing...
My personal favorite were the scooters, which were eventually outlawed because they marred the gym floor, but sometimes our gym teacher would let my best friend and I use them after school.
For indoor recess, I remember playing hide-and-seek, which was difficult because there weren't many places in a classroom to hide, but we still tried. Indoor recess was a time of rebellion because there weren't any teachers in the room, only hall monitors, so we had free reign. My best friend and I built a sweeeeet lego house in 5th grade and would stay after school to work on it. Having a best friend who's mom was a kindergarden teacher enabled us to stay after school, because she would always be there lesson planning. As we got older, we played hacky sack; I was terrible.
Living in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, I often had to make up a lot of games to keep me occupied. I had a huge boulder in my front yard that we would play "Indian" on...We would go around my yard, which was more like a forest and collect mud, dirt, sticks, plants, etc, to put in a big pot that I would "borrow" from the kitchen, to make Indian soup. My mom wasn't too happy about this, especially when I stole a freshly baked pumpkin pie and put bird seed in it.
As I got a little older I would play things that were jobs, such as: store, cooking show, etc. My two favorites were architect: where I would design and build environments for my toy cars, dolls, guinea pigs, and school: which was my most elaborate game. My best friend and I each had two classes of beanie baby students (so that when we went to each others houses, we would each have a class to teach.) This game was a HUGE production and took up my entire dining room and her entire playroom for what seems like years. I guess we were doing something right, because my best friend is now a teacher, and I am an architect.
During winter we loved ski tag, building snow structures and having snow ball fights. We would spend a lot of time at my friend's ice rink making up skating routines and crashing off of the sides into the huge snow banks. During snow storms we would sled down the road before the plows came. I think after huge snow storms was the only time that I wasn't afraid to live in the woods, because everything would reflect off the snow and seem less dark.
Forts. I can't talk about my childhood without talking about the many forts we had. We had SO many tree forts throughout my childhood; and we would stay in them for hours. My best friend had at least five different tree forts at her house which we would build platforms and rope ladders for. When we got older, another friend and I realized that we could build the forts by the road and then have a secret hideout to throw things at cars, or put sticks, snowballs, pumpkins, etc. in the road and watch them get run over. We thought it was hilarious.
Looking back through my childhood, I realize that I was more of a rebel than I thought. All of the games that I remember had some aspect of rebellion against authority or some fear of getting caught. I was probably just oblivious. I also realized that a lot of my childhood memories happened at my best friend's house. She lived in a less woodsy area, so there were more kids around to play with. When I visited my cousins in Illinois the summer before high school started, I was amazed that neighborhood kids would just gather spontaneously in the street to play basketball, baseball, tag, ghost-in-the-graveyard, etc., without having to call each other and organize rides home, etc. It was so much fun and I wish my childhood had been more like that. I hope my kids will have that experience.
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