The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [117]
With water games, the main challenge is usually not the game itself, at least once you’re on your way to mastering swimming—it’s your nose, and how to keep water from rushing into it. You have three choices:
Breathe out sharply through your nose as you jump or duck underwater. The air coming out of your nose will keep water out.
Use one hand to hold your nose.
Find yourself an old-fashioned nose plug, the kind attached to the front of a rubber necklace. Clip your nose shut.
Thus prepared, below are a couple of aquatic games for those who can get to a pool or other slow-moving body of water.
MARCO POLO
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The famed explorer Marco Polo was seventeen when he left Venice, Italy, to join his dad and uncle on a horseback journey to China. He did not return home for twenty-four years. While traveling, he befriended the Emperor Kublai Khan and was one of the first Western travelers of the Silk Road. He was fascinated by China’s use of paper money and its intricate postal delivery system, innovations that far outstripped Europe’s development at the time.
How Marco Polo’s name got attached the internationally known pool game, no one knows, but here are the rules.
You need at least three kids, and everyone starts in the water. One person is It, and her goal is to tag the other kids. She closes her eyes, thus blinded (or you can use your handy bandana for a blindfold). Then she counts to five, or whatever number you all agree on. To try to find the other kids without seeing them, It must listen and sense where they are. Whenever she wants, she yells “Marco.” Everyone in the game must immediately respond “Polo.” The girl who is It uses the sounds of the other kids’ movements and voices to find and tag someone. Whomever she tags becomes the new It.
VARIATIONS
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Now, there are some alterations you can employ to make Marco Polo even more amusing and challenging. If you choose to, you can allow “fish out of water.” This means the non-It kids can get out of the pool. However, at any time, It can yell “fish out of water” and if someone is out of the pool, that person automatically becomes the new It. If no one is out of the water, the other players often yell “no.” (Hint: This can help It reorient and find them, too.)
You can also allow “mermaid on the rocks,” which is similar to “fish out of water.” If someone is a mermaid on the rocks, she is sitting on the ledge of the pool or the lakeshore with only her feet in the water. Again, if It yells “mermaid on the rocks,” any mermaid becomes the new It. For either of these out-of-the-water variations, if It calls for fish or mermaids and there are none, she must do the start-of-game countdown again.
Another fun addition is “alligator eyes,” which allows It to call out “alligator eyes” (or “submarine,” if you prefer) and then swim underwater with eyes open for one breath. Usually It is allowed to use this only once. We’ve heard of some places where It is allowed to go underwater and look around any time, but cannot move until she is above water with eyes closed or blindfold on again. We haven’t played this one, but you may want to try it.
Other Marco Polo variations are popular in different places throughout the globe. In Argentina, kids play a version where It has to say the name of whoever she tags. If she is right, the tagged person becomes It, but if she is wrong, she remains It and starts her countdown again. In California, they play “Sharks and Minnows” (called “Silent Witness” other places), which means there is no call and respond, just the sounds of kids moving in the water.
WATER POLO
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While Marco Polo can thank the real Marco Polo for its name. water polo’s comes from the game’s rubber ball, which came from India, where the word for ball is pulu, hence polo.
Water polo was invented in England in the 1870s, though