My+childhood+garden+and+games

1. discuss with your partner your childhood backyard/ garden/ things you played/ games as a child. use a blank piece of paper to draw a sketch to help you describe your back yard. However if you played more in the front or lived in an apartment then describe the places you played & the games you played. Below are some games that Australian Children played before computers & play stations! have you heard of them? can you search for more? eg in [|www.ask.com] type in Australian children's games +1950 -1970 can you search for the meanings of these games: knuckle bones hop scotch skipping rope cubby elastics hoops go cart sling shot marbles water bombs if you don't have much luck try this web page or ask Kendra http://www.macgregoss.qld.edu.au/federation/histschool/1951.html

When I was young I tried to play every kind of sport, if that was possible, because I lived in a small town and there were not many fields or centres to play a lot of sport. My favourite sport is soccer; I like it more than any other sport. When I came to Australia I started to play indoor soccer a couple of times a week but that wasn't enough for me and when my friend called me to play soccer outside on a big field I agreed with him. That was a veteran league "over 40". A few months were very good but second season was too much for my left knee. I had cartridge problems and ruptured the cruciate ligament {ACL} Now after surgery I need one year off before I can play any sport.

** Well when I was child, I played a lot a games like tangga(Monopoly), Ular Naga ( Dragon ), Elastic that's really really nice games, Badminton, I Climbed fruit trees in the bush like Mango, Kecapi, Buava ,etc. ** ** I would swim with a couple of my friends in the little river and try to catch fish. We played Hula hoop that's like a circle made from a root of Bamboo, we bend it to make a circle and we played swinging it around our body like dancing. ** ** Sometimes my friends and I learnt traditional dancing together at our school. We played Tak Umpet; a game where one of you closes your eyes and give a couple second to let another child hide, after that you try find all of them, in English it is called hide and seek. ** ** We played Congklak with an oval piece of wood but it has a couple of small circle places in the wood, we played that with snail shells from the sea, the winner is the one who wins lots of snail shells from your partner. **

Speaking about my childhood memories and games, I have to say I am from a large family of six, four children and the parents. We had a large old house which all of the kids had grown up in. We had a big garden that was full of trees and flowers. My mother loved that garden and looked after it like her children. Everyday she spent several hours in the yard watering the trees and cleaning it. I remember one of the most amusing games that made us so busy was hide and seek. Although we made so much noise and probably destroyed some flowers but my mom was ok, she was glad because we were happy. Actually I have to say, there were many other games that were very common in my home country of Iran. A traditional game we played was called ‘haft sang’  it means seven stones. We would pile 7 stones on top of each other & one team would try to knock them over with a ball. If they did knock them over then the team would try to quickly put them back on top of each other again while the ball was being thrown at them. The team to get their rocks back in a pile was the winner. By Sepideh

Most of the games I played at home were from my imagination. I used to build cubbies so many that parents called me multiplex, the name of a large construction company. My cubbies didn’t have to have walls and a roof, simply a circle of stones with some missing for the entrance, my imagination created the rest of the cubby house. In primary school, if it was raining, we’d play skip, knucklebones, elastics or hop scotch. If the weather was good, which was most of the time, we’d play hide and seek, grandmother’s footsteps and of course we’d build cubbies. On weekends we often went to family friends, who had children our age, in particular Jane and Paul’s house. We often played spaceships, probably because we’d watch the TV program ‘Lost in Space’. They had a huge play room with a long old stereo, all the knobs were our spaceship controls. Paul must have been captain and I think I must have been co- pilot because I wouldn’t sit for long. Jane and my brother Rowan, who were 3 and 4 years older, spent a lot of time in the ‘sick bay’, behind the curtains. Jane played nurse and I don’t remember my brother’s role, but he got sick a lot! We’d play spaceship for hours until our parents would come in and tell us it was time to return to our home planets. I wonder if they would be embarrassed if I reminded them of the games we played?