Some children's games from China

Our new collection of some children's games from China.

One of my favorites:


Nestle a Person

Players are divided into groups of two, which are scattered on the playground. Make sure there is a distance between the groups. Players in each group stand in a line. One group volunteers to be the runner and the chaser. The game begins with the chaser trying to catch the runner. Both the runner and the chaser must run along outside of the play groups. The runner can join one of the groups at any time, either in the front or at the back. Once the runner has joined one of the groups, the person at the other end of the group must start to run as the new runner, and the chaser continues to try to catch the runner. Once the runner is caught before joining one of the groups, the runner and the chaser switch roles.


Courtesy of Dr. Tong Liu , PhD, Professor of Early Childhood Education, Hebei University, China; Post doctoral fellow of Yale Child Study Center, U.S.A

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction - a new resource for cubicle warfare

If I could travel back in time and give my early adolescent self a gift of potentiation and portends of power, it would be a copy of John Austin's Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction. If I were my father, on the other hand, I'd take that book away from me in a most timely and uncompromising manner, hide it in a place where only I could find it, and read it from cover to cover.

On yet another hand, my going on 8-, going on 21-year old granddaughter loves this book.

Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction contains 241 pages of detailed, painstakingly illustrated instructions for making (and here I read from the table of contents) launchers and bows, slingshots, darts, catapults, combustion shooters (combustion shooters!), minibombs and claymore mines, and, finally, concealing books and targets.

Did I mention combustion shooters? Like the famous match rocket which you can make out of paper or wooden matches, with nothing more than aluminum foil, a needle or pin, a medium binder clip (Austin loves those binder clips), a toothpick and a large paper clip? O, there are warnings. "Eye protection and a safe firing range are musts" declares the ever-pragmatic Austin. "Match rocketry is not an exact science," he cautions, "misfires and modifications will be needed to find the perfect balance." Match rockets! How inexorably cool is that?

There are two things that make Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction such a fun read: 1) every "weapon" is made out of common household objects, and 2) the instructions are exceptionally clear and well-illustrated. OK. There are three things: 3) the sheer ingenuity of the designs. It's the very kind of book MacGuyver might have read during his training course. For fun. Of course.

Want more? Visit John's site. Learn a little about him. Print out a few targets. Get instructions for building more. Meditate on the nuances of "implements of spitball warfare."

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Kites in the rubble

Lawrence Downs of the New York Times describes how children in Haiti make out of sticks and scrap plastic:

"The Haitian boy’s kite starts with thin sticks — woody reeds or straight twigs scraped smooth with a razor blade and cut to equal length, about eight inches. These are lashed in the middle to make stars of six or eight points, sometimes more. Thin plastic, ideally the wispy kind from dry-cleaning bags, is stretched over the frame and secured with thread. Rag strips are knotted for the tail, then tied with thread to two of the star’s lower points: a Y with a long, long stem. More thread is tied to the kite’s taut chest, the rest spooled on a can or bottle."

Downs notes the extreme hardships of survival, and then drifts, like the kites he describes, into poetry:

"One way to resist is to fly. The kite makers dance through the camps with rubbery exuberance, trailed by younger children, all lost in the moment, the most important in the world. Kites battle kites, their makers yanking their lines to cut each other’s, as the kites whirl and spin. When one kite wins, the jubilation is explosive. It’s one of the few signs of joy you see in Haiti, entirely handmade."

photo by Lawrence Downes

via Boing Boing


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Laughter Games Workshop at the American Laughter Yoga Conference

It is official. The two days following the Fifth Annual All America Laughter Games Yoga conference in Albuquerque - August 30 and 31 - will be devoted to an intensive Laughter Games Workshop. Here's the write-up:

"Join funsmith Bernie DeKoven for this special 2 days intensive, highly instructional, ultra-pragmatic and profoundly fun laughter training where you will explore and expand your own sense of fun to enrich and bring a new level of vitality to your own life and that of the people you work with. This event is open to and beneficial for all, and even more so for Laughter Yoga professionals who wish to take their practice to the next level. "

See also: Games that make people laugh - a workshop in the playfulness as a life skill

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Baseball in the streets and hallways, basketball in the bathroom, golf in the gutter, and dinner table Olympics

Interested in reading a PDF file of the keynote presentation I'm giving today at the 36th Annual International Conference of The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) and the 25th Anniversary Conference of The American Association for the Child’s Right to Play (IPA/USA)? Hmmm?

Here it more or less is: Baseball in the streets and hallways, basketball in the bathroom, golf in the gutter, and dinner table Olympics


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith