Thanks to Sarah Skabelund for this great idea
We just did a great activity that is really easy and quite inexpensive to do. (We have 85 children in our primary.)
Our theme was, “Promises from Heavenly Father” It goes along with the theme from the Primary for 2006. It centered on Noah’s ark. We had the children come in and while we were getting everyone there we had them trace their hands on colored paper and write their name and a what they were going to promise Heavenly Father that year. The older children helped the younger ones. The only thing I wish we did different was make sure there were more even colors. We had 19 blue and 2 red at the end. While everything else was going on, we cut out the hands and made it into a “rainbow of promises”. It is now in the primary room as a reminder.
Our four rooms were:
1- Animal relay race: We asked the children to donate new or gently used animals that we then donated to a fire station. We collected over 100, and the fire station was excited. They hand the animals out when children are in car accidents or other situations where they may need an extra hug. For this relay we put all the animals into a kiddie pool at one end. At the other end we had two rubbermaid bins with pictures of arks at the front. We had to save the animals by taking them from the pool to the ark. We put masking tape down the middle to form two lanes to run in. They did the races forward, three-legged, backward, and a lot of other ways. It was really fun. At the end, we gave them all a finger puppet from Oriental Trading Co. http://www.orientaltrading.com/otcweb/application?namespace=search&;origin=searchMain.jsp&event=button.search&Ntt=39%2F523&Ntk=all&Ntx=mode%2Bmatchallpartial&N=0&x=2&y=11
2- Don’t eat the animals: This is like Don’t eat Pete game. I had a card with 12 animals on it and laminated it. Then I got gummy bears from Sam’s Club and you place a gummy bear on each animal. Send one child out of the room and pick one of the animals. The child then comes back in and starts to pick off the bears one by one. They are trying to get as many off the board. When they get to the animal that was picked everyone yells, “DON’T EAT THE ANIMAL!” Then it is the next person’s turn. At the end of this we gave everyone a board game and 15 gummy bears to play at home.
3- Animal Matching: We had 12 pairs of animals and they matched them together. At the end we gave them a small set of 6 pairs.
4- Animal Sand Art: We had pictures of animals, and water down some elmers glue. Get some black foam paint brushes and put glue on the animal. Then we had colored sand that they put on the animal where they wanted it.
We handed out some really cute animal bags at the beginning for them to carry everything around in. Also from Oriental trading Co. http://www.orientaltrading.com/otcweb/application?namespace=search&;origin=searchMain.jsp&event=button.search&Ntt=3%2F148+&Ntk=all&Ntx=mode%2Bmatchallpartial&N=0&x=7&y=11
At the end we all met in the cultural hall and we had the bishopric member talk about Noah and the importance of promises and the rainbow. We then served rainbow sherbet and animal cookies.
It was a huge hit with the kids. We had the groups originally go for 20 minutes, but we would shorten that to 12-15. Everyone was getting anxious to move on by about that time.
Hope this helps someone. We found the animal pictures in a the Finch Family File Folder Fun book 2 http://deseretbook.com/store/product?sku=3110969
