Favourite childhood pastime

I loved 'reading. Best of all I loved dressing up and acting out stories with my friends. ..........and paper dolls of course

I loved whip and peerie. Peerie was covered with chalk to make it pretty when it was spinning, skipping ropes, riding a very ancient bike. Indoors I loved colouring and my scrap book. As I was born during the war there were few books available except Sunday school prizes. Usually religious ones. My mother saw reading as a waste of time as it was not a constructive use of time.

We were never aloud to play out on a Sunday either Nannalyne53.Went to Sunday school in the morning,how times have changed.

Ohhh my goodness, where to start !! This was in the 1960's.
Drawing and painting was my absolute favourite pastime followed by:
Making all sorts of things with my Airfix 'Betta Builda' set ( a British version of Lego and in my humble opinion far superior )
Knock down Ginger.
Hopscotch. We never had to buy the chalk as in London, lumps of the natural stuff was everywhere in the garden.
Skipping with Friends using Mums washing line when we thought that she would not miss it.
Making plastic keyring with those packs of Scooby Doos.
Making things with scraps of material using my toy 'Vulcan' sewing machine.
Double balls and then treble balls against the wall of our house which drove Mum and Dad crackers with the incessant noise.
Stamp collecting which was inspired by my lovely Dad. I always dreamed of finding a Penny black, but of course I never did.
I used to love dressing the paper dolls on the back of the Bunty comics too. One I remember was when Bunty wore different Ice skating outfits. Not happy that they were glamorous enough, I used glitter to give them an extra bit of oomph.
This is such a lovely discussion.
It brings back such fabulous memories of the days when all we worried about was who could get the picture card first from the packet of Brooke Bond loose leaf tea !!

I also had a Mr Potato head (the toy, not my own head }

Before I read the thread, having just seen the title, my immediate thought was those cardboard dolls with the cut out clothes with tabs on! One of the comics used to have them for you to push/cut out. How I loved them . Outdoors we enjoyed hopscotch, kick the can, hide and seek, ringing peoples doorbells and running away , skipping to 'the farmer's in his den' and other songs.

I grew up during the war, so mainly outdoor acitivities, when possible. We lived at the coast, and swam and played in the sea, even in winter - adventures! And sometimes exercising the beach ponies on the hard sand and in the sandhills.
I recently found out that German Uboats were spying on the NE coast during most of the war, sometimes came in quite close to the land
Indoors, mostly reading. There was a shortage of books during the war (don't know why) but the library continued. My friends and I asked for books for birthdays and xmas, then swapped them round.

I have so enjoyed this thread. Been reminded of bead swapping (still have some in the various boxes I managed to scavange- Xmas presents of bath cubes etc were best). And my Jacko skates, how could I forget the hours I spent on them, or my bike. I agree that the freedom to play out was a huge plus, though there was also quite a lot of boredom indoors as my only sibling was much older than me. We had a TV from when I was tiny ( rented for the Coronation) and I loved Champion the Wonder Horse, Bronco, the Lone Ranger and all cowboy programmes. I'm finally visiting the Wild West of US this autumn to see where they were set. Whirlybirds was exciting too.

We used to play out all the time too (late sixties, early seventies), skipping , ball games, bikes, making dens, hopscotch. Blocky 123 was great, a form of hide and seek where you had to run back to the post if you were spotted and call Blocky 123. Did any one else play that? Indoors during long Yorkshire winters my sister and I would read and make up our own stories and poems. I loved Spirograph aswell, and board games such as Careers and Sorry!

I am amazed at the paper doll favourites. They were mine as well. Also Enid Blyton. I also found- under the stairs books read by my mother when young. They were also boarding school stories, and I loved them. I also remember Felix annuals read by an uncle. Black and white they were.
Given the choice though I would always be out wandering quite some distance from home. So different to now.

Roller skating, skipping, bally up the wally, marbles, reading, building things like carts to attach to our bikes etc. listening to my grandson playing with grandad I wonder how much screen time today's children really have. He rarely aske for my iPad if there is something more interesting going on.

Yes - paper dolls for me too. Mine were Pat and Pam. I don't rememmber if they came with those names or whether I thought them up myself. And always colouring books.
Outside it was always skipping. And in my early teens I spent hours in the back yard playing twoballs on the wall.

Mine was reading always had a book on the go but before I could read properly it was skipping.

I had a load of pipe cleaner dolls with bead heads. I liked playing 'swimming galas' in the bathroom washbasin with them. Bizarre. I don't know why I enjoyed this so much. I can't swim even now!

I was born just before the end of ww2 and we lived in the country. I alao loved dressing paper dolls, and colouring. Ive recently aquired a grown up colouring book which Im enjoying though DH thinks it a bit odd. Outside, i would climb trees or go to the 'rec' in the village. Woth school friends we qould do lots of skipping games and two ball as others have mentioned. Also handstands. Do you remember queenie qweenie who's got the ball? And tag of course though as i moved around the country I also heard it called 'it' and 'he' but it was the same game. Also loved singing games standing in circles with someone in the middle like 'the farmer's in his den' but also 'poor Mary sits a weeping', ' in and put the dusky bluebells' and a couple no-one has heard of : the green leaves are calling' and 'the wind blows high'

Gosh what a lot we used to play...two balls,skipping,jacks,picnics in makeshift tent in garden,on my bike,scooter and I used to be ace on my stilts,and skated everywhere.Climbed trees,was out most of the day till hunger drove me home!,, oh and hula hoop.memories flooding back.So sad lots of children prefer playing games consoles ...my grandson 11 years old looked at me as though I had lost the plot when I suggested a walk in the park!!! .

I was a solitary, only child and used to spend hours sitting reading in the branches of the big Jacaranda tree at the bottom of our garden in the then Salisbury, Rhodesia.

I loved the Enid Blyton books, too. My favourites The Faraway Tree and the Enchanted Wishing Chair as well as The Naughtiest Girl in the School! Later it was the Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer, the Abbey Girls Series by Elsie J Oxenham and Cherry Ames books! I also have my Bayko Building set stowed safely in the loft, must get it down and have a go!

Reading anywhere and everywhere! I spent my pocket money in Woolworths on books!

I would say reading was something I loved and, as an only child, things I could do on my own such as fuzzy felt, colouring, my dolls and post office. Also, did you find there were fads, especially in the playground, for example one month it would be skipping or marbles, hula hoop, 'gobs' or five stones, jacks, two balls, handstands. I'm sure there are more. I lived in a block of low rise flats and if it was dry weather all the children would come out to play after 'tea' or at the weekend and we'd play tin can copper or similar games with lots of running about. Happy days.

In the 50s playing all sorts of ball in the street, tennis up against the wall, two balls, cricket & rounders with other local kids - if you could catch, it, we played it. Even shooting goals using an old iron lamp holder fixed on the wall as a netball hoop. Still play with GCs, currently rugby pass training with GD - ruins the gel nails

More or less the same as gj with lots of other 'village' children - much to my mother's horror! Then I was sent away to school! Still there was always the holidays.

gillyknits so glad our posts coincided was wondering if anyone else would remember scraps

So many where to start - Outside the home - Brownies, Bike riding to the park, swimming, roller skating, tree climbing, newt gathering we had lovely pond just outside our back fence, newts were returned to the pond in tact once we had inspected them. Staying with maternal grandparents on the Sussex coast, sitting in their beach hut pretending it was my house, playing with sea weed, building sandcastles, eating SANDwiches on the beach all the more delicious with an outside garnishing of sand.

At school in break - scrap swapping, strange pass time whereby we would buy packets of scrap pictures angels, cherubs and the like, place them in between pages in books then swap the books and push the scrap you wanted to swap up to the top of the page so they were sticking out - then wrangle, negotiate, argue and finally swap one or two with a partner.

At home - Paper dolls, dolls, putting a sheet over the washing line in the garden, pegging it down to make a tent, dressing my friend's wonderfully patient Old English Sheepdog in my school uniform which he put up with, particularly the skirt and school beret bit, poor thing he didn't really like cross dressing or any dressing up, making perfume from crushed Rose petals. Reading - Enid Blyton, all of them, and a lot of children's classics. Ordering more books from the library when I ran out, the thrill of getting the library card to say the latest Famous Five was in for collection.

It would be hard to convey to subsequent generations what freedom we had and how many of us made our own entertainment which didn't revolve around a screen.

Collecting and swapping were the rage.Anyone else remember 'scraps'?
Paper pictures in sheets. We didn't put them in scrapbooks but swapped for one's we liked. We also did the same with beads.
Jacks and handstands. Two balls against the wall and putting on 'shows' for everyone to come and watch.