queens, activity days

I teach the Activity Day girls at church. They are 8-11 years old and we do activities every other week, so 2 a month. This month we focused on beauty. We did an outer beauty night where we talked about hygiene and then did manicures and pedicure to one another. It was a fun, pampering night. But last night, I was in charge of the “inner beauty” night.

I wanted to make sure the girls felt special, had fun, but knew that what we were talking about was important. So I wanted to add details and elements to make it special. The theme for the night ended up as “Being Queens – as daughters of God, we are queens in the making”.

Then I of course had to make crowns. duh. And since I had to do it all for free, because our budget is blown, I made them out of lace I already had. I saw these crowns on Pinterest and was inspired:

Gorgeous right? Yeah, well, it gave instructions on how to make them from lace and so I thought I could …. but it was a bit of a fail. I was trying to do it on the cheap, so I didn’t go out and buy fabric stiffener, I saw online that you can make your own homemade fabric stiffener with glue and water. no you can’t. I did it and it didn’t make it stiff. They were semi-firm. Anyway, here was my process:

Apply glue/water mixture (or fabric stiffener if you’re smart) and let it dry completely, overnight.

Apply silver or gold paint and let it dry then brush them with mod podge and apply mad amounts of glitter. Let it dry completely.

Then, give up on making them completely stiff and turn them into quasi-tiaras with ribbon you have on hand. Whatever works.

The plan for the evening was this:

They come into the room and I wanted to have a “throne” for everyone (steal the chairs from the foyer), but we have too many girls coming for that. So instead, I am having a set of tables set up in a U shape with chairs.
Then they will all be seated and we will watch these two Mormon Messages for the youth … in this order:
Next, we’ll play a game I made up called “WWQD? (What Would Queens Do?)” Throughout the game the girls will be guessing and playing charades to find out what queen qualities we are working to possess and then doing an activity for each quality.
I brought my magnet board from home and put up this awesome picture of a girl in a crown.
There are 4 qualities we focused on. It’s supposed to be all about the girls’ inner beauty, so the qualities are: be kind, THINK, be modest, and the 13th article of faith (which obtains just about every quality we need).
Be Kind – played charades/Pictionary/hangman to figure out the quality, then we played “Baby I love you, won’t you give me a smile”. Sometimes being kind is simply a smile.
(THINK) “Think before you speak” – played charades/Pictionary/hangman to figure out the quality, then played “the minister’s cat”, where you have to think quick and come up with a quality for the cat in alphabetical order. You clap your hands in a beat and go around the circle in the order of the alphabet.
Be Modest – played charades/Pictionary/hangman to figure out the quality, then broke into groups of 2-3 girls each and had them use magazine cut outs to create outfit boards for certain occasions. How would a “queen” dress to go to a swim party, prom, work, school? etc etc. They glued all the outfits onto the page and showed the group.
This was fun, I got to ask them what they thought about modesty and how it worked in their lives. We had a good discussion.
These girls were finding a modest outfit to wear to working at Subway. :)
13th Article of Faith – play charades/Pictionary/hangman to figure out the quality, then I will teach them to memorize this. However, they already knew it and so we just recited it. We were out of time anyway, so it worked out.
Once done, I had handouts and sugar cookies for the girls with little sparkly crowns on top:
And that was it. I had fun and I think the girls liked it too. I usually do too much, but this was a good balance for me. It wasn’t going overboard with decorations or extras, but hopefully it was just enough to let them know I thought this topic was important enough to put extra time into it, making crowns and displaying pictures and having awesome sugar cookies. There we go. Now next time, I think we’ll just sit in the gym and play games :)

One thought on “queens, activity days

  1. You are amazing! (As always.) I hope I’m not the one who is called to Activity Days after you because that would be a really tough act to follow! I’m really disappointed though because your post that is showing up in my feed is titled “poop” and I’m not seeing that one anywhere… ;)

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