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When I look back at my days at Primary School one of the things that I always remember enjoying was when it was tipping down with rain at break and lunch time. Whenever it rained everyone would have to stay in the classrooms and find something to amuse themselves with, so here I present some of the things that were popular to do when it rained at my school.
Take a look and see if you remember doing any of these, and I’d love to hear of any other favourite ways of passing the time when it was raining you might have had.
Paper Aeroplanes: Making something that flies out of paper is always good to while away a few minutes, and wet lunchtimes usually saw a great many paper aeroplanes lying on the floor when lessons resumed.
Groups of friends would get together to see who could make the best looking or furthest flying plane, although it has to be said most people usually fell back on the good old reliable paper dart, perhaps with a little cut made at the back and the paper pushed up to form a tail fin.
Fortune Tellers: Sticking with the paper folding theme the Origami Fortune Teller was also a good time filler. Once you had made your own little future predictor you then went around the classroom telling as many people as possible that they either loved the kid who nobody liked, or that they smelled like poo. Ah, kids eh! What comedians!
Plasticene Play: Plasticene and Play Dough were also a popular choice, assuming some had been left out within easy reach of the pupils that is, which wasn’t always the case.
Whilst building models of things was always great fun one of the more interesting uses of Plasticene at my school was to make mazes. We had these boards for rolling out the Plasticene, so we would use these as a base and roll out lots of thin sausages of modelling clay, then pop these down on the board to create the walls of the maze.
Once completed, a small ball of plasticene, or a marble if there was one to hand, could then be rolled around the maze by tipping the board about.
Building Towers With The Maths Blocks: Did your primary school have a big box full of little 1cm x 1cm x 1cm wooden cubes? Ours did, their intended use being for helping with Maths school work – things like measurements, area, volume etc.
They may have been tiny, but it was still good fun trying to see how big a tower or how fancy a pyramid you could make out of them. Fun that is until some other kid came over and swiped them all over the floor, and the teacher then made you pick them all up again because you shouldn’t have been playing with them in the first place.
Trying To Watch The Big TV On Wheels: For the more mischievous, if the schools big wheel around TV happened to have been left out (a long shot admittedly, but it sometimes did happen) then trying to switch it on and find a TV station was another way of passing time.
This was never as easy as it sounded though, because most of the time there was no aerial, so reception was always going to be poor, but quite often the only channel ever tuned in was the one which the video recorder was hooked up to.
It’ll be wet play today
Yes, this ended up being quite an apt post for today. It’s not very special out, is it?
We a very small primary school – only 2 classes when I was there, although it’s more than doubled in size since then. And our head teacher, Mr Battersby, (who also taught the ‘big class – ‘) played the guitar in assembly. If we were lucky – and well behaved – he used to gather us all together for a sing-song! “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “The Gypsy Rover” and “In A Cottage In A Wood” are the ones I remember most clearly. Ahhh, happy days!
Oh, I remember “In A Cottage In A Wood”. Something like this:
In a cottage in a wood
Little man by the window stood
Saw a rabbit hopping by
Knocking at the door
Help me, help me, help me, he said
Or the huntsman shoot me dead
Little rabbit come with me
Happy we shall be
Is that the one you were thinking of Emma? It also had a whole load of accompanying actions as I recall, and we would repeatedly sing it missing out an extra line each time and only doing the actions when not singing.
Ah, happy days.
I’ve not even tried going out!
Once you had made your own little future predictor you then went around the classroom telling as many people as possible that they either loved the kid who nobody liked, or that they smelled like poo.
Ah, how wretched was the lot of the kid who nobody liked (was it ever anyone whose unpopularity stemmed from the fact that they did smell like poo?)! School could be a cruel place, couldn’t it? Sometimes I wonder how I survived it myself!
With respect to the entry about making paper aeroplanes, this was, funnily enough, a favourite activity in one of my classes in my second-to-last year of school. The class in question was held in the homeroom of one of the lower grades, and often, my classmates and I would amuse ourselves in it examining the poster projects and other bits of schoolwork that had been done by the students whose room it was, and which had been left pinned up on a few noticeboards around the room – we used to love checking what grade each piece of work had been given, and laughing at the poorly done ones that had gotten well-deserved D’s (hmm, what was that I said about school being a cruel place?). Anyway, a favourite activity was to surreptitiously take down anything from the walls that had caught our eyes, and pass it from person to person so that everyone in the room had a chance to look (and laugh) at it. Once they had, it was then passed on to someone sitting by one of the windows, who had the honour of folding it into a paper plane and tossing it out said window! (The classroom in question was situated on the second floor of the main school building, and anything thrown out its windows ended up on the roof of an adjoining building.) And what was the class that saw us all engaging in such disgraceful behaviour? Why, religious education of course!
It’s only long after you left school that you realise just how mean kids could be to each other, isn’t it? I’m sure we all took the mick out of somebody else at school at least once in our lives, whether it was deserved or not.
I certainly remember sessions of humiliating pieces of work being passed around for classmates to laugh at. Funny how you felt absolutely no guilt in doing it at the time.
Yes, Big Boo, that’s the one! Always felt so sorry for that little rabbit. Just hope the little old man stuck to his word, and didn’t eat him……