“Light as a feather, stiff as a board” was briefly popular when I was in elementary school.The bible-thumpers claimed that it was satanic, and nobody bothered to explain the gimmick, so the fad ended quickly.
Not really a fad but now that you got me thinking…penny soccer. Also, did anybody else play dots? Was it ever made into a flash game? You take turns drawing lines between two dots. No diagonals. If you drew a line that completed a small square you put your initial in the square and got another turn. Whoever had the most squares at the end, won. We passed many music classes and study halls filling notebook pages with hundreds of dots and lines. Like below, only much, much, bigger.
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My mom taught me this game when I was really young. I strongly associate it with doctors waiting rooms. Hangman too, but that’s pretty common.
Which I lost.
In third grade.
I still have a grey dot on my wrist where future fencer and powerlifter Scott Carlisle* stabbed me with an insanely sharp Dixon #2. The scariest part was when the teacher walked in. I had blood streaming down my hand, and every single student was screaming that I’ve got lead poisoning now.
*yeah, I’m naming names… until justice is served!
For us, pencil fighting rules were each person take turns holding their pencil horizontally while the other person would pull back the top of their pencil to snap the metal part onto the wood of their opponent’s pencil. The first person to break the other person’s pencil was the winner.
Yes, we called it pig pen. WIkipedia calls it dots and boxes.
Oh yeah, we had that, too. It would have been 1981 or so, and was two NFL pencils for a quarter. I still have a complete pencil set of all of the NFL teams from 1981. Baltimore Colts, LA Rams, and Houston Oilers!
When I was in elementary school, it became a fad to toss stuff up into the inverted bowl-shaped shades hanging pendant-like from the ceiling when the sister’s back was turned. They were the shape that’s now called “schoolhouse” and were opaque.
Since it was California, there was rarely a day when the lights needed to be turned on – especially because the outside wall was almost completely covered by huge windows. One rainy day, the lights had to be turned on, and all that junk tossed up into the lights showed up silhouetted against the shades. Busted.
Ha! In my school (jr high), red and black worn on Friday meant you were a Lesbian!
I don’t know if there’s an official name for this, but there was a short-lived fad in my 7th grade cafeteria of guys tossing M&Ms (for example) in the air and catching them in your mouth. Higher the better. I made it all the way to the lunch room ceiling, about 20 feet. The clacking of candy on teeth when you didn’t quite make it was quite loud, even with all those kids eating lunch. The air was dark with free-falling candy and the floor was bloodied with the remains of failed attempts (or maybe that was the ketchup packets that were constantly being stomped). The “fad” only lasted a week.
Slam notebooks were big for about 2 months at my junior high in the 70s. I thought it was just local to our school, but they eventually turned up on an episode of Facts of Life. Wikipedia says there are reports of them going back to the 1920s.
At my kids’ high school, everyone knew that girls who wore white pants liked anal.
I grew up on a chicken farm, so I had to do it for nothing but a roof over my head and food in my belly. I had to watch the other guys getting cash.
I taught kids at a school where I worked how to do it. Their teacher didn’t mind me teaching them, since I’d set the bar pretty low earlier by giving them tips on armpit farts. My record, with quarters, was somewhere in the low forties. I’ve done over thirty in the past 10 years, and could probably get up and do that right now if I had that many quarters lying around.
You have my sympathies! 
Something popped into my head last night related to this thread. You know those weird little not-quite-songs that kids make up and repeat to each other? Like what the two kids do in Big – how Tom Hanks convinces his friend that he’s really him? And the Laverne and Shirley rhyme in the credits of that show?
Well, in my elementary school we had the following little nonsense verse:
IshsSKIDilly OSHen TOSHen bo bo baDITTen DOTTen WATTen TATTen shhhhhhh.
Anybody else have something like that? I always wondered if it was “real” that someone was repeating from somewhere or something that just someone made up.
^ During the football game at the end of MASH (the movie), the cheerleaders use that as a cheer, which leads me to believe it was something popular in the late '40s – a song, maybe?
Was it exactly that phrasing? I’m really surprised I wouldn’t have recognized it when I heard it … I saw the movie when it first came out which was years after I was out of school. So, it was probably some 40s phrase that a kid picked up from a parent and spread to the other kids. It sounds really 40s, doesn’t it?
^ This is crazy – you got me doing research! It’s a school room chant – author unknown – called, “Bo-bo Ski Watten Taten.”
Can you believe it?
Hey! That’s really close, so I’m sure it’s the same thing. We never did it in class. And it never was sung like that – just rhythmically chanted. It was totally one of those “passed around on the playground” things.
Thanks for all the hard work! 
Hard work, nuthin’, this is the most fun I’ve had all week – thanks for bringing it up! 
Can’t find a YouTube clip of the cheer but I think the cheerleaders are doing the clapping bit with their pom-poms in hand and smacking themselves in the face!
There is a clip of team-4077 #69 getting the drop on one of the goons on the opposing side and the cheerleaders have a nifty cheer for that.
Freeze! Freeze! American cheese!