ABSTRACT
In March 2000, 70 trainee primary school teachers in their third year of a BEd degree at De Montfort University were asked to observe and record a 15 minute breaktime on a primary school playground as part of a study of children's informal language. This chapter draws on extracts from some of their recording and observation on playgrounds in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes. Their data could be grouped under several headings: jokes, traditional rhymes and games, football, media influences and narrative fantasy games. They had demonstrated that children's traditional games are alive and well at the start of the twenty-first century and that newer influences were continuing to be absorbed and creatively subverted as they always have been; Popeye the Sailor Man and Pokemon, Shirley Temple and the Spice Girls comfortably co-exist. It is interesting to concentrate on the way recent media influences are being absorbed into the language and culture of the playground.
