Activity Days-Our Recent Experiences

As I have spent some time going through the many sites devoted to activity days I have been amazed at the wealth of information. It seems that about any activity idea I have had can be found somewhere with additional advice and tips. I don't want to just re-do what has already been posted in regards to activity days. Sometimes going through all the ideas out there can be overwhelming and oftentimes it is hard to know if a particular activity really is going to work well. I thought I would share a couple of our recent activities and what worked well and what didn't.

• We had a discussion on what makes a good friend and then made friendship bracelets. I was amazed how difficult this was for the girls. I work with girls 8 and 9. Most of the girls had a really hard time. The girls enjoyed this but were easily frustrated. Most of the girls bracelets didn't look how they were supposed to. My recommendation would be to do this with older girls unless you know the girls have quite a bit experience doing crafty things.

• The next week we played this friendship game .This was a big hit and the girls loved it. I would just make sure you use BIG balloons so they don't fall through the holes as easily, especially the last time through. As part of making the yarn web we also had the girls share ideas to give to a secret sister. After the game each girl was given a secret sister. We did this activity around Valentines Day so we then made a valentine card for them to give to their secret sister. They were to give the card and do something else before our next activity. This was a great success and the girls loved doing secret sister we just had to make sure we reminded them to do something.

• We read this article titled  A Banner of Faithfulness (from the February 2010  Friend). Instead of making the banner as suggested we made this  sampler:

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On graph paper, we marked in a head of time with pencil
the words, "Holiness to the Lord". 

The girls then used markers to trace over the X's
and add in their own additional details and a border. 

After they finished we glued an additional piece of graph paper
to the back so the markers didn't show. 

We had previously typed up the section
after the story labeled, A Motto

The girls glued this to the back.

This was a quick, easy activity that the girls really enjoyed. It was the perfect combination of fun and spiritual. Our only regret with this activity was that we had previously gone to our local temple grounds and took pictures. If we had found this article first it would have been neat to make a point of finding these words on the temple.