Mid mornings on Fridays, everyone would gather on the playground for folk dancing. I guess all schools in NSW were doing the same thing at the same time as the folk dancing music and instructions were broadcast and then blasted out over loudspeakers.
Our teachers ran around trying to get some order in the chaos. Pushing and pulling us in clockwise or anticlockwise directions. Things got tricky if there weren't equal numbers of children. As it was a girls only school the taller girls had to be 'boys'.
I can't remember the names of all the dances we learnt apart from the polka. I didn't mind doing the folk dancing classes except when it was blazingly hot in summer.
Another thing we spent a lot of time doing was marching. We would line up in house groups and there would be a a lot of fuss getting everyone in height order - shortest to tallest. The loudspeakers would burst into action, jolly marching music and off we'd go accompanied by shouted instructions 'left, right, left, right. STOP! Everyone, get ready again. LEFT, RIGHT,LEFT, RIGHT'. You'd be concentrating and if you found yourself out of step there would be a funny little shuffly move you could make that would get you going right again.
We would get house points for doing the right thing - looking straight ahead, swinging arms, keeping in step and not laughing when the record got stuck and kept repeating or if it kept jumping.
We practised turning corners when the 'inside' person had to take tiny steps and the 'outside' person took giant strides.The best marching house at sports carnivals got lots of points, so we usually tried really hard. What a waste of time! Unless you intended joining the armed forces where marching seems a good way to show off your uniforms, your numbers and strength, and to make an entertaining spectacle, as a (now) housewife my marching skills have never ever been called upon.
The playground at the primary school was a very different place to the one at the infants school. Although it was still ashfalt and there were lots of scraped knees and elbows because of it, we had shady trees all around the perimeter with bench seats underneath where we would eat our lunch and sit and chat. The main difference was that we were allowed to have skipping ropes or elastics (a favourite game at the time) and as a bonus we'd be allowed to draw on the playground with chalk and play hopscotch.
Apart from those games, girls would bring in other sorts of games and I remember a whole group who was really into dressing up paper dolls. I could never see the fascination - they are probably fashion designers now!
There were various crazes that made the rounds, hula hoops, jacks (knuckle bones), yo yos and the one I really wanted to be part of, but never was, Barbie dolls. My mother thought that Barbies were stupid and not a proper doll. I'll write about dolls at a future date. Another craze was 'jewels'.
Somehow we decided that swapping 'jewels' was just marvellous. I don't even know where we got most of them from - those sparkly gems from junk jewellery. I know I had been given the odd 'diamond' ring from Woolworths or Coles, also Aunty South, from the flats, had a fondness for sparkly costume jewellery and when the stones fell out she gave them to me.
We would sit for ages with our cache of 'jewels' and swap two tiny coloureds for a big 'diamond' - I can't remember exactly how it worked. The practice was banned after some girl in desperation prised a sapphire or ruby out of her mother's ring so that she could swap it for something!!! I don't know if the actual gem was ever found. I think we may have continued a bit of black market trading for a while but as is usual with fads, it faded and something else took its place.
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