It went well.
People seemed to have a good time.
The kids made LOTS of noise,
which is usually a sign of having fun.
(grin)
This was our poster in the foyer.
And then there were little rainbow
signs with arrows showing the way
to the correct door in the cultural hall.
I forgot to take ANY pictures.
So these are all from others...
Once they arrived in the cultural hall,
we had the 5 missionaries helping them
by writing their name on a name tag
and sticking it on their shirts.
I made 100 name tags, each with a colored
puffy sticker animal.
4 colors.
4 groups.
4 rooms.
Once everyone had a name tag we had them
break into their color coded groups and
follow their color coded leader.
(I was the "green" leader / room.)
There were signs on the rooms we were using
with Room 1, 2, 3 or 4.
In one room they were to build an ark
and they talked about things you could put
in your ark that would help you or harm you.
(reading scripture, going to Primary, telling lies... etc.)
I had LOTS of left over little stickers so they
covered their sails with stickers and decorative tape.
I was the next room where we talked about being Noah,
but mostly about being Noah's KIDS.
(Ham, Shem and Japheth - a VERY fun name to say...)
We talked about what it would be like to build
the ark while all your friends and neighbors were
teasing and bullying.
And then filling it with food.
And then living with all those animals!!!
Their favorite part was when I had them each pick
an animal and its sound and then I let them all
make their animal sound TOGETHER for a few seconds.
WOW!
It was noisy!
I was amazed at the insight these kids had.
For example:
Why didn't the lions eat the rabbits?
In each group at least one kid came up with
"I think Heavenly Father made them be friends."
or some variation on that theme.
We only spent 15 minutes in each room and then
they switched and we got a new colored group, so there
wasn't enough time to do all the stuff I wanted.
I brought a prism to show them how it makes
a rainbow but only showed it to one group because
one of the boys knew I had it and asked about it.
The next room was a "Bug" room where they
did something relating to bugs.
(grin)
I have NO idea what they did, but it
had to do with a big bag of plastic bugs I bought
and they pulled one out of a bag and then...
did something with it...
And finally we had the missionaries in a room
where they did the fishing game with poles and
magnets and fish with paper clips and they
caught a fish and there was a challenge on it...
but again, I wasn't involved so no idea what they did.
When we had done all 4 of the rooms
(repeat 4 times.... each time was DIFFERENT
depending on the age group, and how they
responded...)
we fed them lunch.
Thankfully the Primary Presidency from one of the wards
was BRILLIANT and took over the actual distribution
of the lunches - they had the line thread in one door and
out the other through the bug room (set up kind of like
a museum) and then back in another door and out the
other while passing by the kitchen window to get
their sandwich, bag of chips, cookie and bottle of water.
As they passed down the hall back to the cultural hall,
there was a station to add tomatoes or lettuce to
your plate and small condiment packets.
And someone else had re-set the chairs into long,
snaking lines that sort of made groups without being a group.
Like giant "S" that looped around the end. So everyone
was together but not.
The kids mostly sat on the floor (wood) and the parents
sat on the chairs and based on the noise level
everyone had a good time.
When the kids were done eating, we had little
tables set up around the edges with memory games
and pages to color (and crayons) and some little
tube things to crawl through (used in the bug room
originally... no idea why/how...)
And then they left.
And we cleaned up.
(with lots of help)
And then I took a nap.
Lots of positive feed-back afterwards and on
Sunday - lots wanting to know when we were
going to do it AGAIN!
(Next March????? lol)
