Have children really forgotten how to play? (Part 3)
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUED FROM HERE . . .
These are not, Curtis warns, ideal conditions for gathering material - the children will be self-conscious, and will self-censor to avoid adult judgment. Yet over the next three hours, they eagerly share song parodies, reworked clapping rhymes, movie re-enactments, creative wordplay, even centuries-old traditional games that their teachers appear never to have noticed. Iona Opie is right: the real challenge is to take in this mass of information as quickly as it is paraded.
Current games range from "Damsels in distress", with boys rescuing girls using firemen's lifts, to Pop Idol and Harry Potter. "You pretend to be on a broom and fly around throwing wands at everybody casting spells," explains 11-year-old Connor. "The wand's a rolled-up piece of paper. For Quidditch, someone makes paper balls and throws them on the floor, while everyone on your team races to get them."
Popular culture, particularly film and TV, constitutes a major spur to role-play games. Depending on current fashions, influences might be The Incredibles or Scooby Doo, Power Rangers or Robot Wars. To play Tweenies Tig, we are told, the person caught must perform the role of a respective character. For Lord of the Rings, you need a ring made from a cut-up toilet-roll and an imaginary bow and arrow. "You have two people on a team, and if one gets killed, you go and help them," William explains. "But we've had to stop playing it, as nobody ever agrees to die."
"We make up our own games like Gladiator," explains Lucy, aged 11. "You have to push the gladiators off the wall, and the person who's left wins. We also invented one where we all have to get in a circle, hold hands, spin round really fast, and let go after three, with whoever falls over being out. It's called Spinning." She adds that Weakest Link is also popular, with the questioner allowed to be "as mean as Anne Robinson".
There are Pokemon Battles as well as Ninja games, whose players stretch their sweatshirts to cover their faces "like a Ninja" before punching or kicking their rivals ("You shouldn't write that one down, it's very dangerous," advises Lucy). There are also endless clapping games, their intricate movements familiar to boys as well as girls. Many involve brand names: "Coca Cola, Coca Cola, Egyptian prayer, Egyptian prayer ..."; "A Pizza Hut, a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut", an established American rhyme that became a UK chart hit for the Fast Food Rockers. Other clapping rhymes are more surreal, if rhythmically serene:
"Donnie Macca, Ronnie Macca, biscuit.
I shoo shiwawa, biscuit.
Ice cream soda with a cherry on top.
Ice cream soda with a cherry on top.
Mama mama, I feel sick.
Call for the doctor, quick quick quick."
Two younger girls, a little coyly, offer an alternative:
"There once was a young English girl called
I shoo shiwawa [they touch their eyes and shoes].
All the boys on the football team
Loved I shoo shiwawa.
How was your boyfriend, all right?
Down in the fish shop, last night.
What did he die of? Raw fish.
How did he die, then? Like this ..."
But where do such verses originate? "Someone just brings them in in the morning and everybody just learns them," explains one of the "I shoo shiwawa" girls. They are passed on orally, which accounts for the "Chinese whispers" nature of the local variations: 21 years ago in Hampshire, Iona Opie heard a rather different version that began, "I know a little Dutch girl called Hie Susie Anna...". Lyrics also differ according to region. The Hackney rhyme, "I went to a Chinese restaurant", is equally familiar among Ingrow's children, but with no mention of Andy Pandy. In the Yorkshire version, after wrapping the loaf in a five pound note, the restaurateur says only: "My name is Hi Lo Chicolo, Chicolo Hi Lo, Hi Lo Chicolo, Chicolo Yo!"
"Schools often only see playground rhymes as an encroachment into literacy," Mavis Curtis says afterwards. "They're only interested in seeing the playground as a problem, not as a stimulus to literacy." And when a school does invest in playground "improvements" intended to encourage play, the effect can be to inhibit imaginative expression, she says. "What children like, and use, are inconspicuous features that pass adults by. Here they're using the drain covers and steps to build into dance routines or tig. A defunct old bell push becomes an imaginary lift button. Children's imaginations make use of the natural world around them, yet schools are chopping down trees for safety. It makes me furious!"
Ingrow's playground underwent its own expensive "improvement" programme two years ago, incorporating giant chessboards, draught pieces and large painted grids for snakes and ladders. Safely out of teachers' hearing, some 10-year-olds suggest that the result may not have been entirely constructive. "We'd rather play our own games like Tangle Up, when you all hold hands and have to untangle yourselves without letting go," says one. Others point out that boys keep kicking over the draught pieces. "And we're not even allowed to use skipping ropes any more," complains one girl shyly, "because the teachers think the boys will fight with them."
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
These are not, Curtis warns, ideal conditions for gathering material - the children will be self-conscious, and will self-censor to avoid adult judgment. Yet over the next three hours, they eagerly share song parodies, reworked clapping rhymes, movie re-enactments, creative wordplay, even centuries-old traditional games that their teachers appear never to have noticed. Iona Opie is right: the real challenge is to take in this mass of information as quickly as it is paraded.
Current games range from "Damsels in distress", with boys rescuing girls using firemen's lifts, to Pop Idol and Harry Potter. "You pretend to be on a broom and fly around throwing wands at everybody casting spells," explains 11-year-old Connor. "The wand's a rolled-up piece of paper. For Quidditch, someone makes paper balls and throws them on the floor, while everyone on your team races to get them."
Popular culture, particularly film and TV, constitutes a major spur to role-play games. Depending on current fashions, influences might be The Incredibles or Scooby Doo, Power Rangers or Robot Wars. To play Tweenies Tig, we are told, the person caught must perform the role of a respective character. For Lord of the Rings, you need a ring made from a cut-up toilet-roll and an imaginary bow and arrow. "You have two people on a team, and if one gets killed, you go and help them," William explains. "But we've had to stop playing it, as nobody ever agrees to die."
"We make up our own games like Gladiator," explains Lucy, aged 11. "You have to push the gladiators off the wall, and the person who's left wins. We also invented one where we all have to get in a circle, hold hands, spin round really fast, and let go after three, with whoever falls over being out. It's called Spinning." She adds that Weakest Link is also popular, with the questioner allowed to be "as mean as Anne Robinson".
There are Pokemon Battles as well as Ninja games, whose players stretch their sweatshirts to cover their faces "like a Ninja" before punching or kicking their rivals ("You shouldn't write that one down, it's very dangerous," advises Lucy). There are also endless clapping games, their intricate movements familiar to boys as well as girls. Many involve brand names: "Coca Cola, Coca Cola, Egyptian prayer, Egyptian prayer ..."; "A Pizza Hut, a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut", an established American rhyme that became a UK chart hit for the Fast Food Rockers. Other clapping rhymes are more surreal, if rhythmically serene:
"Donnie Macca, Ronnie Macca, biscuit.
I shoo shiwawa, biscuit.
Ice cream soda with a cherry on top.
Ice cream soda with a cherry on top.
Mama mama, I feel sick.
Call for the doctor, quick quick quick."
Two younger girls, a little coyly, offer an alternative:
"There once was a young English girl called
I shoo shiwawa [they touch their eyes and shoes].
All the boys on the football team
Loved I shoo shiwawa.
How was your boyfriend, all right?
Down in the fish shop, last night.
What did he die of? Raw fish.
How did he die, then? Like this ..."
But where do such verses originate? "Someone just brings them in in the morning and everybody just learns them," explains one of the "I shoo shiwawa" girls. They are passed on orally, which accounts for the "Chinese whispers" nature of the local variations: 21 years ago in Hampshire, Iona Opie heard a rather different version that began, "I know a little Dutch girl called Hie Susie Anna...". Lyrics also differ according to region. The Hackney rhyme, "I went to a Chinese restaurant", is equally familiar among Ingrow's children, but with no mention of Andy Pandy. In the Yorkshire version, after wrapping the loaf in a five pound note, the restaurateur says only: "My name is Hi Lo Chicolo, Chicolo Hi Lo, Hi Lo Chicolo, Chicolo Yo!"
"Schools often only see playground rhymes as an encroachment into literacy," Mavis Curtis says afterwards. "They're only interested in seeing the playground as a problem, not as a stimulus to literacy." And when a school does invest in playground "improvements" intended to encourage play, the effect can be to inhibit imaginative expression, she says. "What children like, and use, are inconspicuous features that pass adults by. Here they're using the drain covers and steps to build into dance routines or tig. A defunct old bell push becomes an imaginary lift button. Children's imaginations make use of the natural world around them, yet schools are chopping down trees for safety. It makes me furious!"
Ingrow's playground underwent its own expensive "improvement" programme two years ago, incorporating giant chessboards, draught pieces and large painted grids for snakes and ladders. Safely out of teachers' hearing, some 10-year-olds suggest that the result may not have been entirely constructive. "We'd rather play our own games like Tangle Up, when you all hold hands and have to untangle yourselves without letting go," says one. Others point out that boys keep kicking over the draught pieces. "And we're not even allowed to use skipping ropes any more," complains one girl shyly, "because the teachers think the boys will fight with them."
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
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