May 06, 2008

Simple Pleasures of Classroom Games

This on Book Cricket from Krish Ashok had got me all nostalgic.
So nostalgic, that I am almost blurting out "in our days...". However, considering the recent employee introduction note (sent by me to my HR for an internal communication to our employees), and considering the number of "youthful colleagues" in our company, am parking the "blurting out" bit for now.
Ok, ignoring that deviation, back into the topic of this post...rediscovering the simple pleasures of classroom games...i will list the classroom games am familiar with, while leave out the simple pleasures for you - readers of this blog (which most likely is my wife, my dear friend chakra, and myself) - to fantasise. Am also going to ignore the "vaaliba vayathu classroom games" like love-letter-giving, padam varainthu kaattuthal etc.
Book Cricket - detailed out to the core by Krish; however, a point to note here is that in our school we had a variation with bowlers coming in; the modality is that the batsman would be given the book by a bowler for every 6 flips. So we know how to track who took maximum wickets, and know how to award the "bookie of the match". Another important point to note is that the library period had the "encyclopaedia" book as the most popular one, because every gang had theirown book-cricket tournaments, and the encyclopaedia was the LORDS.
One-pitch-catch - This can be easily played in the class with a simple plastic ball, or even pingpong ball. Any of the essay notebooks or the record notebooks can become a bat. Was a popular one.
Name-Place-Animal-Thing - Excellent game to build vocabulary and expand knowledge of zoology and geography. And a good creative outlet for pushy bully people who did not know many animals or places starting in letters like 'X', 'Q' etc. Many actually invented lot of new places on earth, and new animals including fresh species. Some even stooped to the level of classifying plants as animals.
Tic-Tac-Toe - Very addictive; you know the mechanics...
Dot-Conection - 9x9 or 16x16 dot matrices are drawn, and the two opponents need to keep connecting one dot to adjacent dot. The objective is to keep drawing lines, and complete a small square. The one who draws the last line, gets to put the identification mark for himself/herself in that box - literaaly owning the box. One who gets the maximum number of boxes with their logo/symbol/id mark is the winner. The funpart is there are many situations where with one single line, one will get as many as 4 to 6 boxes.
Kings - the lunch-break game; do I need to tell more?
Hand Tennis / Round tennis - played with coverball and bare hands...good game for lazy bums like me who wanted to convince self that some good exercise is being obtained through this physically-strained game, rather than the really straining ones like actual tennis or cricket
Dumbcharades and pictorials were popular too
Ofcourse, there were those guys who would bring gilli, goli, bambaram to the class and play.
Any more games, you guys remember?