Since June, I've been serving as 2nd Counselor in the Young Women's. I particularly help oversee the planning of the activities. There were other things such as Girls Camp and FSY in June, so I didn't really start doing activities until July. The youth help plan the activities, so I'm not doing all the planning, but there were a few activities that I came up with and executed - making apple pies, balloon battleship, and the ice cream and inspirational messages night.
Making pies turned into quite a lot of work - mostly trying to plan enough supplies and ingredients to make 20 pies! We had plenty of apples on our tree, so they were fresh-off-the-tree apple pies. I also had to experiment with making crust so that I would be able to teach them how to make crust from scratch. We didn't have time to make the pies and bake them in the activity time frame, so we just prepared the pies to bake at home. Each girl and leader were able to make a pie for her family. Since we weren't baking the pies at the activity, I made a few pies beforehand that were done and ready to eat after they prepared their pies. So, on Weston's birthday, I ended up making 4 apple pies! It was a lot of work and a messy activity, but it was a lot of fun. It was harder for the girls to peel the apples than I expected, but they did really well putting them together. We did an apple pie with a bottom crust and an apple crisp topping - the best combination!
The other activity that required quite a bit of work was water balloon battleship. One of the other leaders found the idea and it sounded like fun. I added a twist to the original game by adding a scripture trivia component. Teams had to compete to answer scripture questions the fastest to earn the water balloons for their team to launch. I came up with about 25 questions or so for 4 different rounds - Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Church History / Doctrine & Covenants. As individuals from each team answered questions correctly, they earned balloons that would be used collectively as a team during the launch phase. At the launch phase, balloons were distributed and people found a place to stand on their side of the grass, from which they couldn't move. A sheet divider was hung on a volleyball net so that you couldn't see where the other team players were standing. Then teams took turns launching the balloons over until all the balloons were gone for that round. The team with the most "hits" on the other team won that round. Pretty fun... they also enjoyed the free-for-all with the remaining balloons once we were almost out of time. Thank goodness for the easy fill water balloons (although it still took some time filling 600 water balloons for the activity)!
Another activity I planned was ice cream sundaes and watching short inspirational church videos. That one didn't require much planning, and the leaders all helped out with bringing ice cream and different toppings for the sundaes. The girls each picked out a short 2-4 minute video they wanted to watch, and then one of the other leaders got all the videos lined up ready to watch.
I didn't do the planning for very many other activities this summer. We do the first 2 activities with just the Young Women, the 3rd week's activity combined with the Young Men, and the 4th week's activity combined with all the youth from 2 different wards. Those are the big ones... but we're only in charge once every 4 months on those. That was the water balloon activity for us. We're in charge of the 3rd week activity every other month. We had several pool parties or BBQ's this summer (I didn't take hardly any pictures at those). One of the combined activities was a drawing competition, which was Disney themed. They had 5-10 minutes to do a drawing based on a category and then all the pictures were judged. Weston and Jared's drawings got chosen a couple times as top notch for that category.
The Young Women just had a karaoke night, planned by one of the girls. It turned out to be really fun. They really got into the singing and dancing. We've got a great group of youth!
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