The children learn how traditional games evolve in different cultural contexts and are influenced by the specific play-spaces or terrain as well as the availability of materials, whether from nature (sticks, nuts, stones…), or discarded objects (rags, socks, gloves, wire…). They are introduced to the infinite variations of traditional play by comparing their own games to those found throughout history in paintings, photographs and their parents’ and grandparents’ accounts of their childhoods.
In the Joint Activities between Jewish and Arab schools, the schoolyard is divided into play-stations. Parents and grandparents teach the games of their childhoods such as, marbles, gogoim (adjoim), Hopscotch, Gummi (elastics), French skipping (U.K.), Chinese Jump Rope (U.S.A.). In Alambulic (Doodes), Taka Wijri or Tippycat (left), played like rounders or baseball in the Middle East and cricket in Britain, we can see the extraordinary skill and dexterity required to send a 2-3 inch hand-crafted wooden stick spinning across the air, having been hit by a hand-crafted wooden ‘bat’ or cut-down broom stick.