Ice Fishing Patterns
Ice fishing fulfills the courtyard pattern. You build a little shanty village every day with huts (if you're fancy) or chairs (if you're not) around a central courtyard Β that is divided between tipups, and a fox&goose track for the toddlers to run in. Adults are facing in both to monitor the food-gathering, and the 'the kids aren't falling in the hole or getting too cold'ing,Β and you pack the whole village out of your truck in the morning and back into your truck after sunset so you get to build a perfect fresh village each day. Fox&goose also a brilliant innovation really: you stomp or scrape a big wheel-with-spokes into the snow, and the kids play tag but the rules are you can't step off the scraped pattern; this means kids will never fall into the fishing gear. Itβs especially effective because "don't put your footprints outside the stamped pattern" is the kind of rule that children love and will self-enforce. (I don't mean 'none of them will step outside the lines,' but I mean 'when someone steps out of the lines, the other kids will say HEYYYYYYYYY and stop playing until the defector is following the rules again.)
