As kids growing up in a village, my friends and I played with button whirligigs and we made them out of broken pieces of clay pots discarded by our parents: Take a piece, rub its boundary on a hard irregular surface until it is smooth and discoid, make a hole in the center (take care not to break the object), pass a thread through this hole and keep the thing at the midpoint of the thread. Hold the two ends of the thread with your hands, spin it for a while and stop, and then immediately start whirling the thing by alternately pulling and releasing the tension on the thread.
That brought me down some interesting Wikipedia journey, this former farm machine repairman built a whole collection of Whirligigs for two decades after he retired:
He was hard-worker his whole and he couldn't sit around all day, so he spent 6-days a week (except Sundays) building some really creative "kinetic art" from old machine parts.
The town of Wilson, NC has turned it into a park after he died:
Here’s a wiki with some nice drawings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirligig#Button_whirligigs
We also made ropes with jute, spinning tops of wood with an iron tip etc. We could not afford to buy things such as these. It was fun :)