It’s scary to think that, decades later, in a completely different part of the country, 3rd graders still magically wake up one morning knowing about these paper fortune teller things and how to make them. Okay, in the south, we called them Snapdragons; she calls them fortune tellers. The most common name is Cootie Catcher.
Point being, like so much playground culture, this is oddly universal, varying less than an accent might from region to region, and is usually taught to you by a peer (not as part of the curriculum), with few people able to remember how and where they acquired the knowledge. Think about it: Go to any playground in the world and you will eventually hear “Neah neah ne neah neaaaaaaah.” Who wrote that song, and when was it appointed the official song of playground taunting?
What is this?! Jungian collective consciousness? DNA memory? Darwinian survival instinct? Alien telepathic transmission. Screw Common Core and iStep… figure out how this apparently subconscious anthropological communication works and teach them that way…
