Thursday, July 9, 2020

Games Cheerleaders Play



My big excitement for last week was rearranging my yarn. Seriously. I removed it from a box containment system and put the various skeins in bags... Yeah, I won't bore you with details. That just means that today is a #ThrowbackThursday day. 

The new Blogger makes it harder to go back to older posts. Sigh. So, this isn't as way-back as I could go, but it'll do. It's from May 23, 2014, and it was an interesting day. 

It was a Friday near the end of the school year, and I ended up subbing for the cheerleading coach. She taught science the rest of the day. It was only for 6th period that I had the cheerleaders. All sitting in one classroom. With nothing to do.

(Well, technically, they had a "study hall". But rarely do the students in these types of classes, i.e. student government, the yearbook, the golf team, do anything on days like this.)

I managed to get roll taken, and then I sat back. One girl asked the others if they'd like to play a game.

Days like these I get to be a fly on the wall. They know I'm there, but quickly they forget all about me. And I get to see them in their natural habitat. What sort of game were they going to play?

The girl announced that they were going to play "Going on a Cruise Ship". Each girl got to take two items with her. And if she got the items wrong, she was booted off the ship. Now, the rules of the game were kind of unclear, because one girl said she'd bring her swimsuit but was booted off while another said she'd bring an alligator but could stay.

But that was the point. From playing the game and listening in, the girls had to catch on. (A girl near me explained the situation.) It was a puzzle. And it ticked a couple of the girls off.

(I've done a couple cursory Google searches, but I have been unable to find the games. So, sorry, I can't provide rules.)

Apparently, they played this game at cheer camp last summer. And there were other games, too. After they all figured out the cruise ship rules (or some just gave up).

The next game had to do with a bouncing ball. Not an actual bouncing ball, but a fictional ball that one girl threw to another, but that girl missed it, and it went... That's what they had to guess. Who had the ball? This one they figured out pretty quickly.

Then the first girl took three dry erase markers from the board. She arranged them on the floor in the middle of the group, saying that she was "drawing a picture" of one of the girls. (No vandalism took place.) Then the girls had to guess who she drew.

Now, for me it was hard to follow along as I didn't know the girls' names. I learned a few as they did all of this, but from my vantage point and where the dry erase markers were, it was hard for me to see the full picture. (I could have gotten up. They wouldn't have objected if I sat among them. But I didn't.)

The last game had them looking at the moon (figuratively) and having something with them. Again, no rules. They had to figure it out themselves.

It drove some of them crazy. One girl would think she had it, attempt to do something using the rules as she understood them, and find out that she had it wrong.

I thought it was a great mental exercise. Very educational. Of course, I didn't mention that. They were having too much fun. (Or maybe "fun". You know, the kind that makes you crazy because you want to know how it works. Kind of like magic tricks.)

16 comments:

  1. I like the creativity with it and at least they weren't trying to be on their cell phones during the class. Got to give them an A for ingenuity.

    betty

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  2. I'm impressed with their games. The closest I've ever done is mental tic-tac-toe. I still like playing it.
    This morning I folded and sorted a bunch of fabric scraps and remnants. Doing that kind of stuff helps me achieve zen. :-)

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  3. It's really fun to be a fly on the wall around kids, when they really let their guard down.

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  4. The minds of cheerleaders ... yeah.....

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    1. It depends on the cheerleader, I suppose. I've found many of them to be very pleasant. Not all, of course.

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  5. Sounds like a game we used to have to do on team-building days with school. Except we weren't on a cruise ship, but either an island or a raft - but same principle.

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  6. Sounds like a good mental exercise at least. Shows kids are still well able to entertain themselves even without phones!

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  7. This sounds like they were having fun and not being trouble makers. the games sound like a campfire game my mom in law loved to play...black magic.

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    1. I did black magic back in the day... I don't find the cheerleaders to be too much trouble, usually. The golf team on the other hand...

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  8. Great to watch them playing! Will you show a photo of the new yarn storage?

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  9. I reverted almost immediately to the original Blogger. Tried it a few days and - nope! Don't like every single item in its own box. Who's idea was that?

    My husband is great at these kind of games. Years working at summer camp, and as a youth minister, I suppose.

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    1. Does he know the rules of the ones I described? Because I'm curious (still).

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  10. I can imagine this. It must have been a whole lot of fun!

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