

Close your eyes and picture your childhood summers. Long days, ice in your drinks, blue skies, always outdoors, always making our own fun. The summer holidays seemed like they’d never end.
These days our children’s lives can be so structured, with every moment catered for, that they almost don’t know what to do with themselves for an unaccounted for stretch of time.
Here are 6 simple games we used to play as kids, that our kids would also love today.
1. Water fights.
Long before complicated super soakers, you only needed 3 ingredients for a good old-fashioned water fight:
- A hose,
- Water balloons or simple water guns,
- Kids.
These water fights could go on for the whole afternoon, aided by some serious, stealth-like hiding, ambush water-bombing and the all important access to the hose. (If you had access to the hose, combined with a water-depleted moving target, you were King).

2. Bike riding.
I used to have this set up at my suburban home, where I would ride around the perimeter of the house on my little gold bike, including riding down a plank of wood laid down over couple of stairs (the highlight of each lap, obviously), and then I would shoot off down the driveway, swing out onto the footpath and loop around the dead-end of the road, coming back to do it all over again. It was bliss, it was fun and it was freedom – and I could do it for hours on end.
3. Four-square.
Ah, the humble tennis ball. Thrown against walls for a solo session, or hit against walls with friends and tennis racquets. Or, at its finest, mastered and manipulated with the thrills and spills of a game of Four-square, or its simpler version, Two-square.
All you needed for this was some distinguishable lines – a couple of skipping ropes would do the trick – and you had yourself a tournament.
With one simple rule, that the ball must bounce in your own square and then your opponent’s, the key with Four-square was getting down low and angling the ball to make it almost impossible to return. Spectacular.
