Fear Factor

This month we are focusing on Faith. The faith value is very easily geared to spiritual-activities so for at least one week we went in the opposite direction and planned a fun/almost too exciting activity. It was a success, a lot of our girls even got out of their comfort zones to participate.

We started off the night with a quick devotional about Faith vs. Fear. As we all know, both can not exist at the same time. If we rely on faith, and not fear we will be far better off.

We chose to focus on individual challenges rather than team challenges (which really upped the participation).

For the challenges, we had a table set up with about brown paper bags that were labeled by lines from the scriptures... Be of Good Courage, Be of Good Cheer, Take Courage, Be Strong, Have Faith etc. Each bag contained all the ingredients for a challenge. There are a lot of Fear Factor related activites/game ideas floating around on the web so we did some searching and found some games that worked for us.

-Challenge #1- Quick Hands: put your puzzle together the fastest. Winner receives 1 point.
Rules: When the judge says go start assembling your puzzle. Once you have all your pieces together raise your hand and say finished.
Supplies: puzzles (pretty easy ones)

-Challenge #2- Doggie Treats: Each girl has to transfer a dog treat from one end of the gym to theother using only their mouths while crawling on all fours. Winner #1 gets 3 points, #2 gets 2 points, and #3 gets 1 point.
Rules: Get on all fours and carry a dog treat to the other side of the gym using your mouth.
Supplies:1 box of dog treats.

-Challenge #3- Stuff Your Face: Who can stuff their face with the most marshmallows. Winner #1 gets 3 points, #2 gets 2 points, and #3 gets 1 point.
Rules: Within a specific amount a time, who can stuff their mouths with the most marshmallows wins.
Supplies: Bags of large marshmallows.

-Challenge #4- Yoggie: Who can hold the yoga position the longest. We did the Tree Pose. Winner #1 gets 3 points, #2 gets 2 points, and #3 gets 1 point.
Rules: Be the last one standing.

-Challenge #5- Ice Melt: Pass out ice cubes to each girl. The first girl to melt the ice cube using only her hands wins. Winner #1 gets 3 points, #2 gets 2 points, and #3 gets 1 point.  
Rules: Only use your hands!

-Challenge #6- Baby  Surprise: Each girl has to take a bite of three different types of baby food (Make sure that they are the gross flavors like Mac & Cheese, Turkey Dinner, etc.). She gets one point for each flavor that she guesses correctly.
Rules: No gagging.

-Challenge #7- Bare Feat: Fill up a baby pool (or even a baby bath, it doesn't have to be big) with water, ice, and COLORED marbles. Each girl has one minute to stand in the pool and use only her feet to remove as many marbles as she can. One point is received for each marble the she successfully removes.

Bones About It

Halloween is coming, we had to celebrate.
We encouraged everyone to come dressed in their costumes.
We had some crazy sweet decorations
We had a treat table (chips, dips, spooky drinks)
We dipped caramel apples
We played Halloween games
We ate candy
And gave out skeleton trophies!

Look at that beauty!

One of our leaders had some flimsy skeletons (we're talking Dollar tree here) that she got crafty on. She got out her glue gun, gunned the joints of the skeleton so that they stood in different positions, mounted them on some cardboard, and spray painted them gold. Everyone wanted one.

Integrity Progressive Dinner

You all know how a progressive dinner works....one piece of a meal is served at each house. That's what we went off of here except  at each house our girls were served some thoughts on integrity too.
We assigned each leader a part of the meal. We split ours up like this:
-Appetizers
-Salads
-Breads
-Main course
-Warm drinks
-Dessert
We started at the church for opening exercises then walked from house to house. At each house the leader shared with everyone some food, and then a quick thought about a person who they thought exemplified Integrity. It was really neat to hear all the stories that our leaders came up with. We heard about mothers, brothers, George Washington, visiting teachers, and even stories about children from elementary school.

Our Heroes

Missionaries do some pretty intense service, so we thought it would be nice to include them in our Good Works month by sending the Elders some love.
There are lots of missionary kit ideas, we like this one because it's all about super heroes... which is basically what missionaries are in our book. 
We bought all of the treats/goodies and had everything printed up before we met together on Wednesday (note: the link above was for Fathers Day gifts, not missionaries. So one of our leaders made up some notes to include with encouraging scriptures etc). Right after opening exercises we put the girls to work gluing all of the labels onto the appropriate snack and boxing everything up. Then we wrote up some letters and stuffed it all into the box.
We could only send the packages to our Elders that are state side because of shipping costs, so make sure you look into this before you get the post office.

 *Just for the record we did send our out of the country missionaries some letters, good thoughts, and good karma.

Sit Upon the Baby

Open up the nursery room, set up a t.v. and insert a popular child flick, put some fun things (basketballs/beach balls) in the gym, and prepare a snack because tonight we are babysitting for the ward!
We planned tonight's Good Works activity to be all about babysitting. We've been advertising in the ward for a few weeks now that on this particular Wednesday parents can drop off their children between the hours of 7:00-9:00 free of charge.We also passed around sign up sheets in Relief Society/Primary just to get an idea of how many children to expect.
We had the girls arrive a few minutes early to help set up. Then we played with the kids all night, while the parents went and did whatever it was they needed to do. A bunch of the Mom's in the ward all went out for frozen yogurt together, and from what we hear this service was very much appreciated.

Bishopric Car Wash

We started Good Works this month.
So, we washed the bishopric's cars.
It was wet, and there were wet fights.
More importantly, it felt good doing something for the bishopric that does so much for us.

Can you get to the temple by chance?

Girls were split up into groups and put into leaders cars that were equipped with a dice and a pie tin (to roll the dice in). The goal of this activity was to get to the Draper temple in 45 minutes. 

Rules: The dice has to be rolled before every intersection. If you roll an even number then you go right, if you roll an odd number then you go left, and if you roll a 1 then you go straight. After 45 minutes, all the groups were supposed to meet at the temple regardless of where the dice took you so that we could start our devotional. 

None of our groups made it to the Draper temple (though my car DID make it to the Jordan River temple, but that was just a fluke). The point of this night was to illustrate that getting to the temple has to be planned and premeditated.... you cannot get to the temple just by chance. You have to make all of the right choices and live by the standards in For The Strength of Youth. When we all got to the temple, we talked about the How, the When, and the Why we go to the temple then had some of the leaders bear their testimonies about the temple and how important it is to make the right choices to get to the temple (don't forget the personal progress plug. You can pair this activity with almost any of the Choice and Accountability experiences). It was beautiful. I even got a bit teary, which doesn't happen very often. 

That would have been a wonderful close to the activity right? But we went one step further. 

We had a leader bring 8 balloons, one for each of the value colors. 

We took the girls pictures with the balloons and the temple...Holy cow they loved it.

Then we whipped out our Sharpies out and had each girl write a promise on their balloon about what they would do to get to the temple and... we let them go and watched them float away. 

Such a powerful night. And we've got the pictures to prove it. 

Bad Habit Bonfire

We all have bad habbits that we have to CHOOSE to get rid of... this activity was to help us do just that.

We got all the fixin's for s'mores and drove ourselves up the canyon to have a campfire.
The girls were in charch of using their camp skills to build the fire, but before we started cooking we had a quick devotional.
We based our devotional off of an article that Joseph B. Wirthlin once shared in the Ensign.
We explained that bad habits can sometimes keep us from having a burning testimony then passed out paper and pencils for the girls to write their bad habit on. Then each girl threw their bad habits on the fire. The important thing to notice is that while the papers were burning, our fire burned brighter.
So the moral of this object lesson is that when you get rid of bad habits that keep you from feeling the Holy Ghost, your testimony grows stronger.
Then we had ourselves some s'mores.

I had 11 s'mores, a personal record. No big deal.

p.s. We got this idea from right here. Check it out.

Back to School BBQ

Combined activites are fun.
This one was exceptionally fun.
We had a BBQ in a leaders back yard, all typical like.
Then we split everyone up into teams and played pictionary...with chalk...on the sidewalk.
We soon learned that there are some pretty funny things you can do with chalk that you can't do with a pen.

School Shopping

Shopping and Choice and Accountability go hand in hand right?

We split the girls up into pairs, two girls with one leader. Then we asked the girls where they wanted to go shopping and drove them to that store. Each girl was given $50 in fake money and was told to find a MODEST school outfit within that budget.

When we were done shopping we all met back together and looked at all of the pictures of the outfits that the girls put together... we had some skilled shoppers!

After reviewing the outfits, the leaders chose one girl that exercised the most thrift and awarded her a super cute back to school kit that one of our leaders put together.

Then we shared a thought about making righteous choices, including choosing to be modesty. We paired this activity with Choice and Accountability experience numbers #7 (but it would be easy to include #2 and #5).

Modest is hottest ya'll. 

Standards Night Live

We named this Choice and Accountability activity Standards Night Live, for very obvious reasons.

Step One: Fill a room with lots of comfy seats/bean bags.
Step Two: Make lots of popcorn and get other movie treats/drinks (our leaders went to the movie theater and bought us REAL movie theater popcorn, so yummy).
Step Three: Watch Standards Night Live by John Bytheway. John is so very good about saying things in a way that just make sense, especially for the youth. This cheesy trailer even says so.
Step Four: Introduce Choice and Accountability #3 from the Personal Progress book.

Step Five: Lead a journal writing. Have the girls pull out their journals and start writing the things that come to their minds as you ask questions about the blessings and responsibilities of agency, their understanding of agency, and the consequences of choices and their actions.

Timpanogos Cave

Knowledge, week three. 

We like hiking in our ward. We've already been on 5-6 hikes this summer. So for our last Knowledge week, we hiked up to Timpanogos Cave. It is a short hike (Short,  yes. However, it does get steep.) that leads to a cave where there are guided tours (there is a tour fee).  Lots and lots of information and knowledge to be learned in that thar cave! 

After the hike and tour we went to a small nearby park and had some nice cold treats. 

Flower Ruffle Shirts

Week two in July (our Knowledge month) we LEARNED how to make these super cool t-shirts. 

Instructions here. Thanks Momma Go Round.

The girls loved it because they made something they'll actually wear.
The leaders loved it because sewing is still a good thing to learn.
I loved it because I'm cool.

These shirts are a bit time consuming. To finish this project in one night, we paired each girl up with a leader to work together for the night--one cut while the other sewed.

We had one of the leaders who had completed a shirts before the activity just in case there were problems and questions. 

Ensign Peak

Knowledge activity #1. Ensign Peak. 

There is soo much history to this peak; religiously and symbolically so we started out the hike with a little devotional about the history of the peak and what exactly an Ensign means.

Then we hiked, It's pretty short (though it is a bit steep). Almost anyone could do this hike...Seriously, I saw a 70+ year old man up at the top.   

At the top we took pretty pretty pictures and looked at the pretty pretty view.

Where else in the world can you stand and see 4 temples at the same time?

This hike and I have a serious connection that's a little bit on the ridiculous side. So maybe I'm bias, but this activity was a super success.  

Y.O.L.O.

The Why

Sometimes planning activities is hard. 

Year after year it seems that the Great Activity Idea Well just gets sucked dry. 

So, here on this blog I will document all of the activities we do in our little Utah ward.

Because a good activity is worth holding on too!