Rock, Paper, Scissors

Rock, Paper, Scissors is one of the best things that's come to our classroom this year. We were researching about how to have a more peaceful playground for a law that we were creating, and in the process discovered that some schools use the game as an official policy of argument-settling. Wouldn't it be great if it were actually listed in those schools' handbooks?

Can't agree on if someone was tagged or not? Rock, Paper, Scissors it up, and you're good to go. The best part is....no teacher needed! Arguing over who takes the first turn in the math game? A peaceful resolution is just a rock, some paper, and a pair of scissors away.

Sure, there's still some room for the old sneaky switcharoo. "Roc-issors. No--I did scissors. You probably thought I did rock but I really meant scissors which conveniently beats your paper." Overall, though, it's a marvelous innovation. Who would have thought that such a fairly arbitrary collection of items could hold such power?

The other day, a heated argument was brewing and getting near the pushing stage over who had or had not filled in a certain math problem first on the morning message. I had put one foot towards the impending argument, when the kids broke out into Rock, Paper, Scissors. They determined a winner and that person got to fill in the math problem. No teacher needed. Wow.

Today, I overheard the game being used again to settle a question of turns. When I listened carefully, I noticed that Matthew had added a fourth item to the arbitrary list of items: shoes. As in, "Rock, paper, scissors--SHOES." I mean really, why not shoes? They're just as random as the other items. But no, I felt the need to preserve the accurate wording of this ages-old tradition.
Rock. Then paper. Then scissors. Then SHOOT.

"Shoot, children" I explained to them. "It's shoot. You know, like you shoot something. I mean, I know that guns are bad and are not allowed even in pretend form or in our writing stories, but you need to know that it's not shoes."

I tried explaining this case of funny, mistaken wording to my husband, but apparently this staple of childhood game-settling never made it as far west as Minnesota. Or at least not fully in-tact. According to Nate, you say, "One, two, three" instead of rock, paper scissors. "So then do you say shoot?" I asked. Apparently in the Midwest you just say nothing after the one, two, three. Geez.
Back me up here--the "shoot" is key, right? And none of this one, two, three business. Or Paper, Rock, Scissors, for that matter.


By the way, our showcase performance was tonight and went well! All of our rehearsals paid off and the loud pills worked their magic once again!

Hmmm...just realized that somehow scissors are factoring prominently this week. I'll try to come up with something very profound and entertaining about scissors next time....

Amazingly, Wikipedia has this full-on diagram of the rock/paper/scissors options.
Shoes courtesy of treehugger.com.