Inside, Outside, Inside, On!

I have been blessed with many talents; unfortunately, hand-eye coordination is not one of them. This of course had certain implications on my selection of recess activities in primary school.


I’m almost certain that if I had to go to a primary school today during break time, I would probably find all the children sitting around each playing on their technologically advanced mobile devices. When I was in primary school, only the teachers had phones, and we had to come up with other ways to keep ourselves entertained through recess.

I’m not exactly sure what the boys used to do on the playground, but I sure know what the girls did. At least what one particularly ball-sense challenged girl use to do.


We use to play a game called Skip tape (Rek Spring for my Afrikaans readers). Ring a bell?


I will be as bold as to say that the person who invented this game, probably had no ball-sense either. Bless them, and the horse they rode in on. (A new Australian saying that I picked up, I’m testing it out). Anyway, it works like this, 3 children play at a time, and two stand about 3ft apart facing each other with a long elastic loop around their ankles. The person whose turn it is sings out a rhyme, while jumping in and out of the elastic loop. The only rhyme I seem to remember goes like this:


“Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite! Inside, Outside, Inside, On! “It doesn’t even rhyme, but that’s all I can remember.


Just goes to show that children don’t necessarily need battery power and fancy graphics to have fun. Or ball sense for that matter. Who needs hand-eye coordination anyway? It’s overrated if you ask me.