12 Children's street culture

Children's street culture refers to the cumulative culture created by young children. Collectively, this body of knowledge is passed down from one generation of urban children to the next, and can also be passed between different groups of children. It is most common in children between the ages of seven and twelve. It is strongest in urban working-class industrial districts where children are traditionally free to "play outside" in the streets for long periods without supervision.

Street children are poor or homeless children who live on the streets of a city, town, or village. Homeless youth are often called street kids or street child; the definition of street children is contested, but many practitioners and policymakers use UNICEF's concept of boys and girls, aged under 18 years, for whom "the street" has become home and/or their source of livelihood, and who are inadequately protected or supervised. Street girls are sometimes called gamines, a term that is also used for Colombian street children of either sex.

Bloody Mary is a legend of a ghost, phantom, or spirit conjured to reveal the future. She is said to appear in a mirror when her name is chanted repeatedly. The Bloody Mary apparition may be benign or malevolent, depending on historic variations of the legend. Bloody Mary appearances are mostly "witnessed" in group participation play or by a man who is about to die.

Childlore is the folklore or folk culture of children and young people. It includes, for example, rhymes and games played in the school playground. The best known researchers of the field were Iona and Peter Opie.

Dorodango is a Japanese art form in which earth and water are molded, then carefully polished to create a delicate shiny sphere, resembling a billiard ball.

A home zone is a living street as implemented in the United Kingdom, which are designed primarily to meet the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, children and residents and where the speeds and dominance of cars is reduced.

Hoop rolling, also called hoop trundling, is both a sport and a child's game in which a large hoop is rolled along the ground, generally by means of an object wielded by the player. The aim of the game is to keep the hoop upright for long periods of time, or to do various tricks.

Kick the can is an outdoor children's game related to tag, hide and seek, and capture the flag, played with as few as three to as many as several dozen players. The game is one of skill, strategy, stealth, and stamina.

Kicked Out is a 2010 anthology compiled and edited by Sassafras Lowrey. The book includes personal narratives from homeless and formerly homeless LGBT youth, as well as policy essays from service providers. The book is intended to serve both as a "guidebook" and to draw attention to youth homelessness to the broader LGBT community.

A children's song may be a nursery rhyme set to music, a song that children invent and share among themselves or a modern creation intended for entertainment, use in the home or education. Although children's songs have been recorded and studied in some cultures more than others, they appear to be universal in human society.

A truce term is a word or short phrase accepted within a community of children as an effective way of calling for a temporary respite or truce during a game or activity, such as tag or its variants. Common examples in English speaking cultures are barley, fainites, crosses, kings and exe(s) in the United Kingdom, pegs and nibs in New Zealand and variants of barley in Australia. In the United States, terms based on time-out have, from the 1950s onwards, largely supplanted earlier common terms based on kings and exe(s). Since the late 1980s time-out has been recorded in other English-speaking cultures besides the US. Examples of use of truce terms are if a child has a stitch or wants to raise a point on the rules of the game.

A walking bus is a form of student transport for schoolchildren who, chaperoned typically by two adults, walk to school along a set route, with some similarities to a school bus route. Like a real bus, walking buses have a fixed route with designated "bus stops" and "pick up times" at which they pick up and "drop off" children.