At Recess Hula Hooping Still Trumps Video Games

From Hooping.org — MSNBC reports, “Children still enjoy playing traditional games like skipping and clapping in the playground despite the lure of mobile phones, computer games, and television,” a study has found. Contrary to popular beliefs, schoolyard games are “not overwhelmed, marginalized or threatened by the quantity and plurality of available media,” researchers found. Their study showed that children still spend their school break times singing the songs that have been circulating for decades, although they sometimes update them by inserting references to the latest pop stars and soap characters. Hula hooping is making a major comeback and dancing also remains a favorite playground pastime, but children now like to base their routines on acts like Michael Jackson or Disney’s hit film “High School Musical,” they said. Other classic activities still drawing in the crowds at playtime include tag, skipping, clapping, rhymes and make-believe games. Researchers at the Universities of East London, Sheffield and the Institute of Education spent two years looking at what children played during their breaktimes at schools in London and Sheffield for the study entitled “Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age.” The study found that while children do make use of the multitude of media resources surrounding them, they “creatively manipulate them to their own ends” and that new media enriches children’s folklore by providing topical themes for them to include in their make-believe games. Full story: MSNBC