HT Games
Hop Frog
Children of the Colonies did not have a lot of toys or equipment to play games with. Instead they had to improvise and use their bodies. Leap frog was a popular game among children; Colonial kids called it hop frog. You need at least two children for hop frog, but as many children who wanted to play could. All the children would form a line and kneel on the ground with their heads down. The child at the back of the line would place his hands on the back of the kneeling child in front of him and hop over each child to the front of the line. He would then kneel at the front of the line and the new back-of-the-line person would take a turn leaping.
Hoops
Kids today swing their hips to get a Hula-hoop working, but that is not what the Colonial children did with large hoops. Along with the hoop the children had a stick. They would roll the hoop and run alongside it using the stick to keep the hoop rolling. Children would race the hoops around a circle or a building. The first child around, still rolling the hoop, was the winner.
Draughts
Today̵7;s checkers are usually plastic, but the checkers of the Colonial period were made of wood. Some of the games children played were training for the future. If a child showed an interest in woodworking, his father would help him learn to carve out something useful and practical, such as a checkerboard, which were called draughts.
Naughts and Crosses
Tic-tac-toe was another game children could play without any more equipment than a stick and the dirt. They would use the sticks to scratch the tic-tac-toe board into the dirt and then to add their X's and O's. Colonial children called the game naughts and crosses.