indoor playground - revisited

when making the calendar of events with the other children's librarian, i was given the option to create my own program. so i decided to bring back indoor playground. who doesn't love playing outdoor games inside? i ask you.

back in my grad school days, while living with miss peonys in albany, she had introduced me to this game called Kubb, an ancient swedish viking lawn game! i bet you didn't even know that swedish vikings played lawn games. i mean, c'mon people you can't just rape and pillage non-stop. sometimes you need to play some lawn games. anyway, the game is pretty basic ... you break up into two equal-ish teams. each team has 5 or so stout wooden blocks (or kubbs, if you will) that the other team try to knock down by throwing short wooden batons at said kubbs. whenever a team succeeds in knocking some kubbs down, these kubbs are added to the opposing teams side. get it? so the more you knock down, the more your opponent has to knock down at the next turn. so it goes back and forth a while, and is super fun i swear. the game ends when one team has knocked down all the other teams kubbs, and then successfully knocks down the big king kubb in the middle. KUBB!

so i thought to myself ... self, wouldn't it be fun to play kubb? but we certainly can't have children throwing around big wooden kubbs inside the library. that would be anarchy, even here in happy new shiny perfect library. so i devised a version of cube in which each team needs to knock down paper towel rolls by throwing small beach balls. it was pretty fun. although, i think the danger element of tossing around hunks of wood was lost slightly. but oh well. the kids dug it.

then we played a game called "steal the bacon," in which a paper towel tube was considered the "bacon" and the kids were broken up into teams and had to try to steal it. each player is given a number which corresponds with the number of an opposing teammate. when your number is called you run into the middle and try to steal the bacon. if you make it back to your team you get a point. if you are tagged by your opponent, the opposing team wins a point. this game is great for two reasons. 1) only two kids are running at once, so there is only slight chaos at any given time. and 2) the kids were endlessly amused by this, asking to play over and over and over again. and all i had to do was stand on the side and call out random numbers.

so what have we learned? we've learned that i can entertain large groups of children using only paper towel rolls.