For our Seminary Christmas Party this year we played a God's Army minute to win it Challenge.
The students loved it.
Here is an explanation of the games that we played. If you would like a list of the games it is located at the bottom of this post.
Keeping Score
Every challenge needs a scoreboard. Here is one that you can save into your pictures and print out, or you can copy and paste it into your printing program. It's fun to have team names that come out of the Bible. You can make them up, or have each team make up their name.
Every Army needs to complete basic training. So for this challenge you could have every team member complete Basic Training by doing 5 jumping jacks, 5 pushups 5 sit ups, 5
burpees.
The first team that has every team member finish wins. If you are worried about some of the kids not being able to do this challenge you can modify the exercises, or have one kid represent the entire team. Do it however it works for your kids. If you have room you could design an obstacle course that the kids need to complete.
For this challenge give each team a roll of aluminum foil.
They have to make the full armor of God on one of the teammates.
Each team should create:
The boots of peace/readiness
The breastplate of righteousness
The helmet of Salvation
The belt of truth
I did not require the sword and the shield. They will use those in other challenges.
The first team to complete the challenge wins.
In this challenge I gave each team a cloth bandage, three bandaids and a beach towel.
They had to pick a wounded teammate and wrap up their head with the cloth bandage, apply the three bandaids, then carry the wounded soldiers carefully across the room on the beach towel.
The first team done wins.
I gave each team a big bag of bubble gum. The players could chew as many pieces and they wanted.
The first team to blow the biggest bubble wins.
What was fun with this challenge was that some of the players took like 12 pieces of gum. Then they found that they couldn't chew them in time. The players who took less pieces actually had the advantage.
For this game you will need a nerf gun and several plastic cups. Write various sins on the cups with a sharpie marker. Some of the ones that I came up with are: violence, drugs, laziness, too much social media, pornography, lying, cheating, bullying, etc. You will need to make two sets of cups, one for each team.
Line the cups up in a row on two seperate tables. Have the players stand about 5 - 10 feet away, depending on their age. You can have one player shoot all the cups, or your can have each player shoot once then give the gun to the next player to shoot, and so on. You could either play until one team shoots all of the cups down, or the team with the most cups down in one minute wins.
For this game you will need a bag of toy soldiers (from the dollar store) and a plastic bucket. For my plastic bucket I used a plastic cauldron that looks more like a Dutch oven than a cauldron. Perfect, right?
I separated the toy soldiers by the color. I gave one team all the green toy soldiers and gave all the beige toy soldiers to the other team.
For each team give one player the bucket and the rest of the players get one toy soldier a piece. They have to try to throw the soldier into the bucket.
For younger kids you can just have them throw one at a time from several feet away. To make it harder I had the students throw it through their legs like the Center on a football team.
The person holding the bucket can move around to catch the soldier. If they miss they cannot put the soldier in the bucket.
The team that has the most toy soldiers in their bucket wins.
Before the kids come hide 24 sheep around the room, 12 sheep for each team. Color code the sheep so that the teams can see the other teams sheep while they are searching. The team that finds all their sheep first wins.
Here is a printout for the sheep. You can print it out on two different colors of paper, or you could just mark them in some way to make them different for each team.
This game was actually a lot of fun even with older kids. I think that they liked finding the other teams sheep and not telling them where it was.
Give each team member a piece of paper to fold into a paper airplane. Each team should have a different color of paper. Have them all fold their planes.
They have to all stand on the same line to fly their planes. The team that has the plane that flies the farthest wins.
Blindfold a person from each team. Have them both stand on one
side of the room. When you say go have them walk to specific
location on the other side of the room.
The person has to find the spot by following the instructions of
their team. Both teams are to give the instructions at the same
time.
In this game each team had to catch the "light of Christ". I gave
each team a plastic dollar store sword and glow stick necklace for
each team member.
When I said go they had to make their
necklace glow and form it into a circle. Then they had to toss it to
the person holding the sword from 10 feet away. You could either
have the team that caught the most in a minute win, or the team
that got all of theirs on first win.
Make a shield of faith for each team from a paper plate (or have
them make it) Use duct tape on the back for a handle and write the
word faith across the front.
Each team picks a player to hold the
shield of faith. The opposite team each gets a piece of paper to wad
up and throw at the person holding the shield of faith. The team
that can hit the most paper wads with their sheild wins.
Have enough blown up balloons for each team member.
Make each team's balloons in a different color.
In 5 of the balloons put a letter that spells out the word T R U T H. Both teams should have their own set of balloons that spell out T R U T H. In the extra balloons put a blank paper.
The kids need to pop the balloons by sitting on them.
Then each team needs to figure out what
the word is. The first team to spell out TRUTH wins.
For this challenge you need a loaf of bread and a jar of jam for
each team. I bought mine at the dollar store.
Before we started I
placed a plastic tablecloth down for easy clean up.
Both teams are to "spread" the gospel to build God's kingdom. By
doing so they had to use the sword of truth to spread the jam onto
the bread. They were to create a tower with jam and bread. The
tallest tower in one minute wins.
I made trophies for the winning team.
This year I used m&m minis . I glued silver cardstock around the m&m mini container. I printed the medallion on the same silver cardstock. I cut out the medallion and glued it to the top of the container with a glue gun.
In the past I printed them out on gold paper and glued them to the top of a Toblerone.
Here are the two different printouts for the medallion.
God's Army Champion
Armor of God Champion
Here's a list of the games if you want to print it out.
Here are links to other ideas that are on my Holly's Home Blog.
Just click on the photo to see the idea.
