By “activities”, I really mean recreational activities that you might not have the time to do if you were at shook all day.

During breaks, my siblings and I would bike, play basketball, swim, literally just run around, etc.

21 comments

  1. I would do the same stuff I would do when having school except for organized activities e.g. sports or music going into break.

    Staying at school the whole day wasn’t a thing in my youth.

  2. Luckily all day school isn’t a thing here. Afternoons were filled with detective/secret agent missions through the village and the neighboring fields and woods. We built unsafe tree houses, hunted for frogs and shot each other with water pistols. When it comes to sports, football was the way to go, although I also remember games with convoluted rules that involved hiding and running away.

    Best time of my life.

  4. Played children’s games outside, board games and tabtetop rpgs (crafted our own too) and learning to program on C64.

    …no wonder I turned up such a nerd. 😀

  5. Play outside, mostly. Football was of course popular, but we also raced on our bikes and as my personal favourite, we played ‘army’. My father crafted me some very cool looking ‘guns’ and blowpipes out of pvc pipes. We also had peashooters made out of balloons and camera film containers which we used to shoot peas and corn at eachother.

    As I got older I started to spend more time inside, mostly playing games on my parents PC.

  6. I was a quiet kid and I didn’t enjoy my childhood much because of mental illness. I mostly played imaginary games pretending to be in fantasy worlds, or I played with toy animals or teddy bears. A little later we would use Minecraft to play, like building a house and playing house in it.

    I was outside playing too but mostly by designated trips in parks or as a
    scout and roleplayer. Or just in the yard of the after school activity club.

  7. We weren’t at school all day. We had school, then went home, and did stuff there: Reading, roaming around the neighbourhood, visiting friends, hanging around plotting stupid things etc.

  8. Riding my bike, watching TV and playing computer games, in my free time.

    I also had Swimming/English/Music private lessons at some point in my childhood, as far as extra-curricular goes.

  9. Summer – Football, video games, play in the woods and just bike around the village hanging out with other people my age

    Winter – Various skiing activities. Either do organized cross country skiing through the local sport club or compete vs friends in the neighbourhood streets. Also make a small ski jumping hill and go down or play ice hockey for fun with friends.

  10. If I was with my friends we’d play. We had a lot of imagination back then and would come up with all sorts of games. If I was alone or with my sister I’d watch TV, play video games, or draw. My sister and I didn’t play much together, as it just wasn’t as fun with just the two of us.

    I spent the summers at my grandparents’. My friends and I all lived far away from each other (not within walking distance that is), and so I would usually play video games. At around 4 pm there’d actually be something entertaining to watch on TV (my grandparents only had the four basic Portuguese channels). A lot of times I had to do farm work though.

  12. I grew up in a small town (population 1200) so we’d be out in nature a lot. (I’m talking about my elementary school years, age 6-10). Since we all knew the other kids from the town we would meet after school and roam around.

    Right in front of my house there was a little creek and we’d spend countless days down there building dams and catching/releasing small fish.

    We also had bikes so riding around town was an option too. Sometimes we’d meet at someone’s house and play with each other’s toys or just play in the yard.

    In winter, when there was snow there were many places to sled or build igloos.

    Basically, lots of outdoorsy stuff like you would see in movies from the 1980s. (I was born in 1981) Those were the years before video games and 20 different TV channels for kids.

  13. Build camps, catch frogs, bike around, play football or basketbal on the square around the corner. During school breaks in elementary we rope skipped a lot and this thing with a big elastics chord and then you had to sing songs and stuff. We also loved gameboys, pokémon cards and flippos.

    I loooved playing with the diablo, i did read a lot.

    Damn WHERE DID THIS ALL GO. And yes I am totally a nineties kid haha

  14. Until I was about 6, play outside all day. Then I moved and mainly just watched TV or read stuff on the internet, until eventually I did get back to being active. Then we’d usually just walk around the town, go to the shopping centre or stay at one of our houses overnight.

    I was also a very strange child. I didn’t like toys, sports or video games.

  15. I used to play together with the other children and my dog, both indoors and outdoors. When I was alone, I either watched television or played with my toys: model trains, animals, and later, Lego, where the funniest thing was to build real or fantasy buildings with them.

  16. Going around with bicycles (i live in the countryside), going barefoot in rivers,playing football, playing games like hide and seek, playing with gameboy (pokemon silver/ruby exc.) playing with playstation (crash bandicoot and gta san andreas exc.)

    Good times

  17. A lot of things. I grew up on a farm, and lived not too far away from a village that had everything a young child could want: A football field, a swimming pool, a few playgrounds, a small hill, a few ponds, so we did a lot of things there.

    So from probably may through september I would be in the swimming pool about 6 days a week, depending on the weather. And next to the swimming pool was a big field of grass, with some trees ans bushes. So a lot of things were possible, from volleyball, football, hide and seek (and variations on that), as well as games in the pool itself including tag.

    Other things that were popular was building huts in the wooded areas nearby. And every once in a while the local government would clean up the mess and take them away, and then you had to begin again in a new place. You could get building material for free at a local carpenter and at a local gardener. It were just bits and pieces they had laying around and wouldn’t need anymore, like for example pallets used for tiles. Other things I remember doing was building rafts, usually out of wood and empty jerrycans.

    Not to mention that most boys my age in the village played at the local football club. So you would be training once or twice a week, and played a game most saturdays. And after that game you’d often stay at the club, and watch other teams play.

    If the weather was less nice lego and boardgames were very popular.

    And, if you were lucky, iceskating in the winter. There was one place where you could start skating as soon as it would be below zero for 4 days, the fastest anywhere around. When you were young you were only allowed on the first part, when you got older you could go further, and if it was freezing for a week you could skate a route that was I think a 13 km round trip, and if you had your skate covers with you you could cross over a bridge (it’s called “klunen” in Dutch) and get on the ice on the other side and add a further 10 km to your trip. Me and a friend went to school on our skates once, as opposed to going to school by bike.

    If it was freezing for over a week I think the whole village, and the villages around us, were on the ice. And we would always have a few people who owned a stall set up shop and start selling food and hot drinks.

  18. Unless it was raining, very cold (colder than perhaps -20C) or dark we had to be outdoor playing with whatever (football, street hockey, “play war”, riding bikes, wrestling etc.). I’m born around 1980.

  19. Outdoors: building little hideouts or weapons (bows, spears), exploring, playing with dangerous things…

    Indoors: mostly Lego, sometimes video games, reading (when alone)

  20. Met up with friends at the local playgrounds or ball courts, biking around with them or playing football or basketball. In summer we made trips a few villages over to a special icecream parlor or went swimming at the local public pool

    In winter we would grab our sleds and walk up into the woodland hills above our town and wheeze down the forrestry road.

    We were rather free in what we could do back then as long as we returned before dinner. When we got older some got involved in youth sports, some went fencing, some played basketball.

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