My son "smoked’ those when he was around 8 years old in 2010. Ice cream trucks sold them in our midwestern suburb. I didn’t really want to encourage it, but when I found him spending $1.50 a pop at the ice cream truck I ordered in bulk off Amazon and rationed his smokes.
We had a pencil machine that was stocked with sports team pencils. Of course everybody had teams they wanted, teams they didn’t, and some were different textures. This was during the Starter jacket era, too. So what would happen with the pencils is you would try to win the other guy’s good teams. They were a quarter each in the machine and part of the thrill was trying to get a good one. Of course no one wanted an ugly losing team like the New England Patriots. If you wanted to trade or sell those, I don’t think you could get a quarter for 5 or 6. of course I discovered you could buy an entire NFL set at some stores.
We did the pencil thing in grade school also but some other kids preferred to be more creative and took up the fad of taking large wads of toilet paper, wetting them into mushy blobs in the sink, and throwing them up to stick on the bathroom ceilings. Our bathrooms had the 14 foot ceilings also the janitors had a lot of fun getting those scraped off.
Did you acquire any perfectly round bruises on your forearm? My sister got several.
Looks like it’s called, “Tinikling.” No charge.
I got a good LOL out of this. Thanks for sharing.
Back on topic of the OP, when I was in junior high, the boys had a unhealthy obsession with the game Bloody Knuckles - this particular version involving trying to keep a coin spinning by flicking it with your fingers, and the poor schmuck who makes the coin fall over having to endure the other participants shooting coins at their knuckles.
Me, being the hungry-for-peer-acceptance dumbshit I was back then, partook in one too many of these games and had quite the set of bloodied knuckles to show for it. Fortunately, when you’re young, wounds heal fast.
Curiously, the game seemed to have died out after I entered high school.
Ah, the milk cartons. Don’t open them from the wrong side! Anyway, for a while in elementary school we would read the numbers on the bottom to see who won. I don’t remember the rules, and nothing was really won except to say your carton was the winner. Also, there was a thing about how one folded in the top before taking the empty carton to the trash. You could make either two triangles or an X depending on how you did it- I guess we were easily entertained.
I remember pencil fighting being a thing in grades 2-4 in two different schools I went to. In 5th grade I remember a short lived fad of hot cinnamon toothpicks. I remember some enterprising kids bringing these to school and selling them to their classmates which I think they just made at home by soaking the toothpicks in cinnamon oil or something.
The Filipino stick dance is called tinikling (tee nick ling) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinikling
In grade school, we’d put wax on the bottom of our shoes and slide around the classroom. One teacher put a stop to when she slipped and fell because of the all wax on the floor. The wax came from wax candy, the wax tubes and soda bottle shaped candy with a few dips of syrup inside.
Rubbing the adhesive off the back of bumper stickers, STP and Wynns were were the most common at the time. Completely pointless as we’d see who could make the biggest ball.
For a short time, a small group of use would have marker wars. Seeing who could mark the other guy’s arms the most. This stopped because my friend and were doing this during class and the teacher made us hold up our arms to show what we here doing.
We had pencil fights too. There was a particular Chinese pencil, Moonlight, that was extra tough and costs 5 cents, which was a lot of money in the 60’s. The Moonlight pencils were crappy for writing, but unbeatable against the regular Mirado brand.
Oh, sure. Those things hurt like hell when (not if) they hit your arm, and they were LOUD. I remember getting off the school bus and hearing the clacking (before the school banned them); it sounded like a war zone. Yo-yos and squirt guns at least had the virtue of being silent.
There was one kid at school who would get a Mini Babybel cheese for lunch each day. He’d peel off the red wax coating, mush it into a ball, and huck it at the ceiling of the gym. It was covered in little red dots after a while.
Americans call that shotgunning, though it’s usually done with a beer can. And the kids are usually older.
Nope. In shotgunning you make a substantial hole and then you open the regular hole to allow inflow of air.
We made a half dozen holes with the sharp spike on the pair of compasses and had to suck the milk out. It was a lot slower than just opening the top.
We had many of the same ones as the folks in this thread, including clackers and doing jacob’s ladder with string. As others have noted, always interesting how things jumped from school to school somehow. Nothing really idiosyncratic to our area, however.
I think unless you grew up in a smallish town, maybe it would be hard to come up with something that is specific only to one’s own area(?)
In middle school, it was a given that only “sluts” wear black and red on Fridays. Does anyone else remember that one? What a horrible thing for young girls to carry around in their minds.
In high school the big thing was to keep your ski lift ticket affixed to your zipper pull(on your puffy, down, ski jacket).
… but deadly. 
One of the local sports talk stations here hosts an annual paper football tournament, so it must have been common in middle schools across the country. Penny basketball, I’ve never heard of anywhere else, though.
The NFL pencils were a big fad, too - this was northern Ohio, where the NFL was king. Likewise, we could buy little plastic NFL helmets, too, out of gumball machines.
This may have been peculiar to my high school, because none of my contemporaries remember it. But for a brief time, wearing surgical scrubs was de rigeur. Then it was khaki trenchcoats (this was pre-Columbine).
No, but you were gay if you wore green and yellow on Thursdays. They were the school colors, so if it was a secret code it must not have worked too well.
In elementary school we’d play “Butt Ball” at recess every day. Like wall ball but you got to ‘bean’ other people in the butt after they messed up. I remember it being extremely fun but I always thought it was something one of the older kids at my school had invented.
I just came across a wiki explaining it is widespread and has formalized rules. Slightly shocked.
I think green on Wednesday was the cue to get teased about being gay in these parts. And the school colors were green and gold.
First off, thanks everyone for their responses, I’ve enjoyed reading them. And don’t worry too much about it being unique to the area. I was just trying to get away from national phenomena like say the Rubics cube craze of early 80’s.
Speaking of which it turns out that my class weren’t idiots they were trend setters decades ahead of their time. 