I'm sooooo excited!! Got a job at dds' school, as lunchtime/playground supervisor...

[earlgrey]

... and the head said he would like to start old fashioned games, like skipping, jacks (of which I know nothing about, jacks that is!)

Any other ideas, anyone? TIA

hula hoops, elastics

I don't recognise either of those! Any ideas for boys? From the sound of them they sound like girls' games. DDs are 7 and 8, how difficult it must be to keep 11 year old boys entertained when you've no experience of what they enjoy.

Foru square and football for the boys. Some people call four squre King I think.

FOUR square. Duuuhhh. Just woke up....

My mum has been a dinner lady for 25 years and I was at the school for 7 of those and now dd1 is in year 4 of the same school.

SM, can you enlighten me?

You need a grid painted or drawn on the floor with chalk.
A big square divided in quarters with numbers 1,2,3 and a K. One of them in one square.

4 children play and some can line up for a go. You need a ball.The children can bounce it with their hands to keep the ball up or keep the ball up the whole time. That is called 'air'.

You are not allowed to hit the ball down on the first serve, but after that the point of the game is to hit the ball down to get people out by having the ball double bouncing in one of the players squares or they let the ball go out of the square.

The children move round the squares when someone is out and the person in the K square is King and they choose whether to play the bouncing version or the air version.

Hmm. It looks so straightforward when they play it!!!!!

Can I just say GOOD LUCK!

We tried to reintroduce all the old games and it turned into out-right war. Unfortunately our staff to kids ratio just isn't high enough to supervise the kids properly when there are so many potential weapons around.

Elastics - resulted in 20 snapped elastics on the 1st day, 2 kids nearly strangled and a lot of catapults appearing over the next few days from the nicked remains.

Hula hoops - good for coralling the trouble causers

Skipping - ropes more popular for use as whips.

Back to the drawing board for us

IME primary school boys like skipping & hula hoops as much as girls and have a great time knowing that they are 'girly' but being good at them anyway. I don't like that games are divided into boy/ girl things.

Other good activities we've had in our playground are:

Chalk - to draw on the playground with (washes off in the rain). Might need rules about appropriate drawings/ words.

Giant chess/ Jenga set (but they are quite expensive)

Hopscotch

Spinning tops

Quoits/ Hoopla

HTH

excellent - how about games like Stuck in the Mud, hopscotch, french skipping (probably same as elastics), What's the Time Mr Wolf, Sly fox, boys would play ball games like Dodgeball perhaps or klick a football around.

Oh, and kids often need to be taught how to use/ play the games - e.g. you can do a lot more with a hula hoop than spin it round your waist - you can roll them, spin them backwards so the stay in one place, spin them round on the spot etc

Good luck.