Some of you Senior Seniors probably remember these pastimes: For Girls: Hopscotch Jacks JumpRope For Boys: Mumbledy Peg Marbles For All: Red Rover ("Red Rover, Red Rover, send Holly right over!") Hal
yes I remember them well... One of our favourites was playing 2 balls against the wall.. but in truth we played just about every childhood game imaginable, we were out of the house playing as much as we could...
Never played any of them, but I did jump rope solo some, and stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once. Mumbledy Peg was before my time, but I heard my father describe it. Have no idea what Red Rover is. I had seen others play marbles, jacks and hopscotch, but never understood the rules, or cared to learn. I now realize that my friends and I were very strange. We never played games. We just did what you might call exploring, or getting into mischief. lol I never hung around with groups of kids. Just one or two at most.
It's a knife game we boys used to play. Every boy I knew carried some sort of pocket knife, mine was a Boy Scout knife. The rules to mumbly peg differed mostly by region. A pretty good video of some of the 'tosses...'.
Red Rover...…my wrists still hurt. The big boys would always pick the little girls to crash through. I always dreaded having to play that game. Dodgeball was another game where you were guaranteed to get the breath knocked outa ya. I loved playing jacks and pick-up-sticks.
We always lived by the lakes when we were kids so most of our time was spent playing water games we made up as we went, in the summer. Sometimes in the evening we would play red light green light and simon says. In the winter we did ice skating and sledding, or bomb fires and ghost stories.
Yeah, I practiced diversity when I was a kid which, if caught by some parents at the time, might have brought on some sort of disapproval unlike today’s world of gender reidentification. It was jump rope, jacks, and hopscotch with the girls and dodgeball, baseball, marbles and football with the boys. I didn’t have a problem with it and the boys who thought I had a problem learned quickly that I was all boy. As a side bar: I noticed a long time ago that parents didn’t teach kids how to play games, kids taught each other how to play them. With the possible exception of group games that the kindergarten teacher or grade school teacher might insist on having their keeps learn how to do, kids pretty much pass the information on how to play the smaller games from one generation to the other. For example, hopscotch (or scotch hoppers) can be dated back to 17th century England and has been passed down from then till now by......kids.
I am familiar with all of the ones in the OP, although I know Mumbledy Peg only from television. While every boy carried a knife, I have never played that one. Marbles was played during recesses and lunch breaks in elementary school, although my cousins and I never played marbles during the summer. Although I have played jacks, I mostly just used them to spin them around, and maybe to see if I could get them all spinning before the first one stopped. Girls played hopscotch, and it was mostly girls who played jump rope, although I took some pride in being able to do that pretty well in elementary school. I can remember Red Rover being played during some of the youth programs in church, I think, but I don't remember having participated in it. Kick the can was a common game. It was a combination of hide-and-seek and tag that began with kicking a can, although not everyone played it the same way.
Since @Ken Anderson brought up games played in church, I recall 4-square being one that was played co-ed even in high school.
The games were better when they weren't organized by parents or teachers. Mumbledy Peg was played by the more agressive boys. I always liked "Simon Says". "Red Rover Red Rover, send Frank Sanoica over!" Hal