SCRIPTURE OLYMPICS

Wednesday night we had our quarterly Primary activity. This year the Primary is focused on families. The first quarter of the year we did a FHE for our quarterly activity to emphasize the importance of FHE in strengthening the family. For this activity we decided to focus on the scriptures as a tool to help strengthen families. I found an idea on-line for the scripture Olympics. After a bit of tweaking we were all ready to go. It was actually a relatively easy activity to plan and execute - this is exactly what we had in mind!! I am giving you all the details for the activities we did in case you need to plan your own Primary activity and need some ideas. Also for me to have in case I have to do a Primary activity like this again in the future.

For each one we told the story and read a key scripture then followed up with an activity. We divided the kids into two different teams and kept the same teams throughout.

Sword of Laban: (1 Nephi 4: 12-13, 18)
Divide into two teams and give each child a plastic knife. They have to balance a marshmallow on the end of it and do a relay.

Noah's Ark relay: (Genesis 7:9)
Two arks were made out of cardboard. One for team "a" and one for team "b". We brought all the stuffed animals we could and put them in piles around the hall. We divided the children into two teams and at the go they were to run and find one pair of animals and put them into their ark. The object was to get the most pairs. (Animals don't need to look alike, simply match animal types... i.e. bear with bear, rabbit with rabbit, etc.)

2000 Stripling Warriors: (Alma 53:20-21)
Make headbands. One group all of the same material and the other group out of another material. Place a rope in the middle of the space to divide the area into two section. One team on each side of the rope. Place a pile of socks balls(rolled up sock pairs) on each side. Throwing underhand the kids have to try and get all the socks off their side of the rope.

David & Goliath marshmallow shooting: (1 Samuel 17:45)
Make a large scale drawing of Goliath and place it on a wall. Give each child a marshmallow and a spoon to try and flip the marshmallows and hit Goliath in the forehead.

Tower of Babel: (Genesis 11:9)
Each team was given and IDENTICAL set of items. The points were given to the team who built (or stacked) the tallest tower. I gave the kids two packets of plastic drinking straws, a roll of tape, and sections of an egg carton I had cut up.

Samuel the Lamanite wall crawl: (Helaman 16:2)
Teach the children the verse of Book of Mormon Stories about Samuel the Lamanite. Then I stood on the stage and the children threw long balloons at me. I told them it was to get back at me for all the times I had told them to be quiet. I am not sure I knew what I was getting into. It was fun though.

Moses parting of the water tug of war: (Exodus 14:21-22)
Pretty self explanatory - do a tug of war.

At the end we gave them all a gold metal with a wagon wheel - in the States you would probably use a ding dong - wrapped in gold paper.

All in all I think it turned out good. It was fun for the kids and hopefully they will take something from it and remember more about the scripture stories we taught them.