Primary Sacrament Meeting Program Review

My Primary counselor called me on Friday and told me that I would have singing time and the time usually used for sharing time. Sister Friendly was out of town and her substitute had to bow out. What was I going to do?

After some consideration, I decided to combine an old game... "Don't Eat Pete" with a game we played last year.

Here's how it worked...

First I asked 2 of the children that were singing well to come up. One child was sent outside the room while the 2nd child chose which picture was "Pete". I gave the chooser one Skittle candy.



The child came back in the room and started choosing the magnetic boxes (I bought them at Walmart - $3.88 for 3 boxes) under the pictures. They got to eat or keep the one Skittle that was in each box. When they went for "Pete's" box, everyone shouted "Don't Eat Pete". His/her play was over. That child then picked a game piece. This is how they saw it.



This is what was written on them (click on the picture to get a bigger view.)



The next part of the game required the children to follow the instructions on the game piece. Most of them had one of the Primary Sacrament Meeting Presentation songs on it, there were a few that had other instructions. The children then (in most cases) sang the song. If they did a good enough job, I moved the flag up each rock the number of Skittles that the child had just earned (anywhere from none to 5).



I do have 2 flags, but only used one in this case. The goal was to take the flag to the top of the mountain in the amount of time that we had. They did a great job. I only refused to move the flag once. It was towards the end of the 45-50 minutes that I had and they were getting a little tired of it all. They didn't sing very well despite the fact that I had all the words for that song. The refusal was meant to be a wake up call and it was.

There were 2 things that I didn't like about this game. The first was that I just had so many parts to the game that I had to be reminded to move the flag or give them their Skittles, etc. Not a huge deal.

The second was that some of the children did not like the shouting of "Don't Eat Pete". They were plugging their ears.

Every child and almost all their teachers played the "Don't Eat Pete" game, but I still handed out some Skittles to each person at the end of Primary. I chose Skittles because we have children with peanut and milk allergies.