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10 Timeless backyard games for warm weather fun

Try these 10 backyard games to make the most of warmer weather.

6. Red Light Green Light

Allen Litten/The Daily News-Record/AP/FILE
This file image shows a stoplight in Dayton, Va.

Another game played around the world, Red Light Green Light has many variations.

One player is chosen to be the "Stoplight." That person turns their back to the group, which forms a line approx. 10-30 yards away (depending on ages of players.) The person who is the Stoplight calls out “Green Light” and the players advance toward it as quickly as they can. When he or she wishes, the person who is the Stoplight calls out “Red Light”, at the same time turning around to see the runners.

The runners must stop immediately. Any player caught moving after a call of “Red Light” has to go back to the starting line. Green lights/red lights are repeated until the first player reaches and tags the person who is the Stoplight and is declared the winner. If all the players are out before they reach the person who is the Stoplight then that person wins that round. The winner becomes the new Stoplight.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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