Nostalgia Nook: Playground Shenanigans

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Samantha Weber, Editor-in-chief

If you ask any child what their favorite part of the school day was, they will most likely say recess. This was definitely one of my favorite parts of the day because it gave me a change of scenery and a break from constantly sitting in the classroom. One of my favorite playground games by far was four square. I am a competitive person, so this was where I spent most of my recess time. Of course, when you are in elementary school, the skill level is not the best for four square. But, when I was in seventh and eighth grade, there was some serious competition for it.

My eighth-grade English teacher took four square very seriously, and he would always play against us when we dared to accept the challenge. There was a club that would play once a week after school that students could sign up for, and I swear that was that teacher’s favorite day of the week because he got to compete against his students. He was also really good at it and would trash talk while he was in square one, which was most of the time. It was always a competition to see who could kick him out of square one and become the ultimate server. My one complaint about the game is how many possible rules there are. Whenever someone would make it into square one, they would go over what rules they wanted to play by and it was always confusing remembering what each person wanted. I think that if there were universal rules it would make the game go a lot quicker.

My other two favorite games to play were knockout, dodgeball, kickball and tag. Now, I never played basketball, so knockout was a weird interest for me to have. I just found it relaxing even though I was very bad at it. Dodgeball and kickball were definitely my favorites in middle school because everyone was older and more athletic than in elementary school. Tag, though, was a whole different story in elementary school. I was fortunate enough to have three different playgrounds we could go to for recess. Two of them were the typical playground with lots of slides and monkey bars for kids to use, so those were always fun obstacle courses to play tag on. The other playground really just had swings and a blacktop. When we would go there, the game of tag would always be very intense because it was just an open area and whoever was fastest always won.

Another good throwback game is four corners and seven up, which is what we would always play in the classrooms when we were taking a break. They usually got pretty intense because people would always try to cheat and then everyone would just call each other out. Whether it was peeking at people’s shoes or sneaking a look at the corners, kids could get pretty crafty in order to win. The playground games that I played as a child will forever hold a place in my memory because of the fun times they provided when I was younger.