Singing time with a twist

My singing time today was crazy! I was greeted at the door by my Primary counselor. She wanted to know if my pianist had gotten hold of me. She hadn't. She wasn't going to be there, had found no one to take her place and I found that there was no one available in our ward to play for Primary (pianists are scarce in our ward).

Any ideas? I play the piano. So the first thing I did was to send my counselor to find my assistant activity day leader to help with the first song. We had been practicing The 4th Article of Faith song in Activity Day and had planned to have the girls teach it to the Primary today. I know that she is capable of leading it at the last minute. She has been teaching it to the girls in our Activity Day Meetings. In the meantime I decided to turn the piano so I could see the children while I sat at the piano and if I had to I could try to do it like a multi-talented music teacher at school... leading, keeping track of all the kids, and playing the piano all at once.

My leader didn't come and music time started. I asked the girls to come up to the front and sing the song through for the Primary while I played it. They did.

At activity day, each girl chose a line of the song and colored a picture to represent the line. After singing the song through, each girl took their visual aid and they said the words, we had the children repeat and then we sang that line. We were about halfway through the song when my very talented and johnny-on-the-spot assistant came. She took over and had the children finish singing by line and then sing the song through a time or two. We then had the girls take stickers and put them on the faces of the children who were singing. They were getting the singing measles.

After we finished that song, I needed to practice with the children for the Mother's Day songs that they will be singing in Sacrament Meeting next Sunday. They already know the melodies for those songs, so we practiced them a capella. I noticed that the children were not consistently doing the actions that we had made up, so I took more singing measles and put them on the faces of the children who were doing the actions. It got all of them doing it.

Singing time was over. Thankfully. And yet, it wasn't really bad at all. The children were well-behaved. The girls did an excellent job teaching the song and my activity day leader took over admirably. It was a crazy day, but a good one nevertheless.

Tie dyed shirts with pictures

As promised, these are the pictures of our tie dyed shirts. When we didn't dip them in the dye, we ended up with more white areas (or tan, since they all bled onto the white when I washed them.)



Here's a few of them up close.
This one reminded me of a very stylized floral print.


This one was the most dyed overall.








I think they all did a great job and each shows a great deal of individuality.

Tie dyed shirts

As I've mentioned, I'm in charge of Girl's Camp in our ward this year. Tonight, we tie dyed shirts. What a mess, but in the next day or two, I'll post some pictures of the results. What amazed me, is that the girls shirts often reflected their personalities. Some were very timid in applying colors, just as they are in real life. Others are very aggressive and that showed too.

Hemp bracelets

It is time for us to start preparing for Girl's Camp and this year the theme is "Peace, Love, Virtue" with a 60's and 70's vibe. I am so excited because there is so much we can do to make camp memorable with this theme. Our ward chose to be the "Hip Hippies", but last night at our meeting, we decided to add "have hearts". The girls wanted to continue with a tradition started last year of giving away gifts to other girls in other wards.

I had gone on line here and found the directions to make braided hemp bracelets with beads. I had other directions for other bracelets, but I thought these might be the easiest to start with. It was a wise decision. The learning curve for this bracelet was time consuming (30-40 minutes), but after they made one, they made the next one within 5 minutes.

This is the sample I made for the girls. Would you believe that the hardest thing for them to grasp was the overhand knot? I ended up tying it for several of the girls, they just couldn't figure it out even watching me closely.



What follows are the bracelets the girls made. These first ones are left open.



The following are closed using a bead and a loop as the clasp.



The bracelets made last night were to give away, but the girls so liked what they did, they begged to be able to have their own. I told them I would bring the supplies to camp and they could make one for themselves there.

This was a very successful craft.

Our volunteer

A while back as we fought the valiant fight with all the weeds that were popping up everywhere, we found this volunteer.



Upon closer evaluation, we realized it was a tomato plant. To pull it out or let it go? Tired of pulling weeds and curious to see what we would end up with, we decided to let it do its thing. We didn't water it or care for it for quite a while, but it survived and thrived.



Now it is starting to blossom and hopefully we will soon have tomatoes.



And we won't have to walk far to pick them. What could be better?

I'd rather be crafting.

For the past few weeks, I have taken a break from crafting and decided to put the fairly decent Arizona weather to good use.

So I have cleaned out my refrigerators, cleaned the stove, harvested and frozen vegetables from my garden, and cleaned my garage well enough to park my car. I don't have any cutesy pictures of crafts, but my house is looking much better. I'm in the middle of cleaning my kitchen cupboards now.

Don't worry though, this next week I need to come up with crafts for girl's camp and activity day so maybe the craft-free streak will end. We'll see.

Thanks for dropping by.

A not so successful singing time

As I prepared to teach "The Church of Jesus Christ" today, I found this website and decided to use the ideas that it suggested. I made the questions on the back of letters that spelled "Believe". I then had the key words made up for when they answered the questions.

The problems began when I realized that a lot of them were singing along with me or else ignoring what was going on entirely. I asked for everyone who knew the song to come up and sing with me. The entire primary except for the 3 year old class came up. I had not planned anything else for this singing time and I was now in trouble. I had 20 minutes and children who knew the song better than me.

I pulled out a game that I had made before Easter. It is a domino game and though I like the idea, I have not been able to make the rules so that they make sense and get the children excited to sing. The children sang well, though, despite their restlessness and boredom. We ended up going overtime and I left some very restless and noisy children for the Primary President to take over and have sharing time. Despite these problems, if I knew the children did not know this song, I would do this again with Senior Primary, not Junior.