Speaking of Creative...

I was so impressed by the Beehives (12 and 13 year old girls) who took a small idea and ran with it to create a life-size game for our last combined activity. We talked about several options and then it was up to them to work with Shawna Freestone (Young Women 2nd Counselor) to complete the concept. They were so creative! The girls made game spaces from full pieces of construction paper before the activity. Each space had an action on it and then a number of blessings. 

Some spaces represented good choices.
Photo courtesy of Susanne Pieper.

While other spaces represented choices that were not good.
Photo courtesy of Susanne Pieper.

The young women did a great job of including items from For the Strength of Youth and real life applications of the values and lessons they have been taught. I was very impressed.

The spaces were placed on the floor to make a life size game board.
Photo courtesy of Susanne Pieper.

The youth could choose to play individually or in pairs. They started the evening by making their own cardboard box cars using tape, scissors, and markers. I was kind of surprised how much the youth got into this part of the game.

A few of the cars in play.
Photo courtesy of Susanne Pieper.

If we played this again, I would be sure to mark the cars with numbers as they lined up at the starting line, as it would make it easier to keep track of the order of play when it was time to spin on each turn. Thanks to Charity Hartson we were able to have a fun spinner.

Charity lent us the family Sit n Spin!

We used masking tape to put various numbers around the seat portion of the Sit n Spin to make our game spinner. Scott Evans was the designated spin master and he would place the spinner by the player's feet and give the seat a spin. The player then put their foot down to stop the spinning and whatever number their foot touched is how many spaces they moved forward. After moving to the appropriate space, the player read the space aloud and blessings were awarded or taken, based on the space they landed on.

Shawna had printed up blessing cards in three denominations (1 blessing, 5 blessings, and 10 blessings) for this purpose. The leaders helped to either award or take back the blessing cards. If a player didn't have enough blessing points to pay up, they had to go back to the start of the game.

Blessing cards being distributed.
Photo courtesy of Susanne Pieper.

When the first person made it to the end of the game board, we gave everyone a final spin and then they each added up their blessing points. It was really a lot of fun! The game also has a great tie to this year's youth theme because we receive more blessings as we seek the best things in life, yet the choice of what we seek is always up to us.