Children's Games: Cops and Robbers

Today, my entire fourth grade class organized a game for recess so we could all play together. First, they took suggestions of games we could play, followed by voting. The game we ended up playing was cops and robbers, though it took an awful lot of explaining and the fortuitous fact that my kids knew the word "police" despite me never teaching it to them. Basically, the game was a variation on tag, where tagged people had to go to the sandbox, or jail, until they were rescued by their friends.



There's kind of a standing rule at this school about how fast I'm allowed to run. It's a brisk enough pace to get me tired, but not so fast that catching me is impossible. One student was super excited about catching me twice. I played with them for the whole recess period and when we finished, they asked if I had fun playing with them, which I totally did. I have great students!

Children's Games: Janken Variant

For a good thirty minutes of tonight's kendo practice, I didn't actually practice kendo. Instead, me and the two girls who had showed up played a variation of janken, or rock, paper, scissors. I'd seen them play it before, but hadn't payed close enough attention to the specifics. Basically, the winner of any given game gets to advance a certain number of steps based on what they won with. Winning with paper gets you パ-イ-ナ-ツ-プ-ル (pa-i-na-tsu-pu-ru) or six steps. Scissors is チ-ヨ-コ-レ-イ-ト (chi-yo-ko-re-i-to), another six steps. Finally, rock is グ-リ-コ (gu-ri-ko) which means only three steps. The goal, for us anyway, was to be the first to make it across the dojo and back again. I realized pretty early on that the respective words began with the same sound as the object that won. For example, rock is "gu", hence the reason that every game of janken starts with 最初はぐ literally "first is rock". It took me much longer to realize we were spelling the words pineapple, chocolate, and Glico, the Japanese chocolate company. It was a strange but very amusing game that I thought I'd share it with everyone.