Traditional Toys making a playground comeback!

A great story from the Shropshire Star gives us an insight into how children can be infuenced by the behaviour of other children. On child buys a wooden diablo and learns a few tricks, then it's a craze. Practice makes perfect. With nothing more technological than two wooden sticks joined by a length of string, 14-year-old Deborah Lilico tosses her DayGlo diabolo some 15 feet into the air.
For what seems like an eternity, it hangs in the blue sky before Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravity kicks in and it’s down to Deborah to catch it on the string.

“Yesss!” says Deborah with delight. “I’m good at throwing it at other people – not so good at tricks.
“My brother can do ‘magic knots’ where you do a spider’s web thing with the string then launch the diabolo.
“And he can do ‘suicides’ where the diabolo is on the string and you let go of one stick and it spins round the stick. That’s really impressive.”

Deborah and her friends from Adcote School in Little Ness are part of a new craze for old toys, with youngsters across the country turning to games favoured by our forebears.
Fads come and go, but here is proof positive that the old ones are the best.
It is break time at Adcote on a day shortly before the school summer break, and as well as the diabolo – a double cone-shaped object that spins on the string between two sticks – the playground throngs to the sound of skipping games to nursery rhymes, children showing off their yo-yo skills and youngsters wiggling their hips to keep their hula hoops spinning.
Hopscotch – a game that requires only chalk, imagination and co-ordination – is in full flow in the corner of the school yard. And it’s only because it’s a girls’ school that card-swapping activities aren’t on show.