So we have decided to have a "Friend Day" on the last Sunday in April to honor our virtue of friendship this month. We wouldn't normally do something like this because it seems so "old-fashioned" in some ways, however, we want to get the kids excited about bringing their friends to church...... Cuz we all know, when the kids are happy, the parents are happy and more engaged. We even sent a letter to all of our parents asking them if their kids could invite some of their friends to spend the night on the 24th so they could come to church with them on Sunday morning the 25th. I hope I haven't ruffled too many feathers with that one, however we have provided a coupon for some pizza and some activities we think the kids would have a good time doing together the night before. When they come to our church services on Sunday morning we plan on throwing a big party in honor of them and using the games and Bible story provided...... Anyways, I was just curious to see if other people were doing something else in regards to the "friendship virtue". If so, what are you doing? Anyone got any great ideas to share?
Friendship Virtue-more cool stuff...
(6 posts) (4 voices)-
Posted 1 year ago #
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........by old fashioned, I just meant, we encourage the kids to bring their family friends all the time, so having a special Sunday just seems old school.....I in no way want to offend anyone that has special "bring your friend days" Does that make any sense? :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Hey,
Our elementary director had a very similar idea, calling it Discovery Island Friendzy (Discovery Island is our K-5 environment name). She met with some volunteers today to brainstorm for it. I'll see if she can share some of that here.
Nick
Posted 1 year ago # -
We just met today to plan for our Discovery Island Friendzy and I am excited about all that the team came up with. We will also have this event on the last Sunday of the month to wrap up the virtue. Our intent for this day is to have an on-site event for small group leaders to have some designated time to spend with their small group members. We really want to build the idea of team... and small group and just celebrate the friendships that our elementary kids are hopefully making at church. Having said that... we have also advertised it as a great day to bring a friend!
Each small group will be assigned a color over the next two weeks and will come up with a team name with that color in it. We are encouraging the kids to come in dressed and "accesorized" in that color on the 25th. At KidStuf this week, I came out and talked about it at the end wearing a purple shirt, purple glasses, a purple wig, purple bracelets, bandanas, etc... to show them they can go as crazy as they'd like with it. Hence the name... Friend-zy! We are planning to prepare boxes of things to "decorate yourself" for kids that come in for the first time or may have forgotten as well. Our large group leaders and other leaders in the environment will dress in all colors (tye-dyed).
The way we are structuring the day is to have kids come in and join their small group leader to create a team flag. The flag will have a pocket on the back of it to collect puzzle pieces they will receive as they move throughout the day. After the flag decorating, we will move the groups through stations. Each station will have some fun, team building activity. One station will have the kids make friendship bracelets and have their small group team photo taken. They'll be given inexpensive frames to have their small group friends sign so they can take the photo home in it. Other activities are games, etc... that requite team work.
At each station, the team will receive a puzzle piece. At the end of the station time, each group will have time to put their puzzle together and share some food treat as a team. Then we'll move to large group where each group will share what they experienced, show their flag and place their completed puzzle on a large board (backward). Once all of the groups puzzles are up on the main board... it will say the virtue and it's definition. We will end the day with worship b/c we thought the best way to end would be to celebrate the best friend we could ever have-Jesus! Whew... that was a long post. Sorry, just thought I'd fill you in on what we came up with. I'd love to hear what everyone else is planning for this month.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Another thought we had originally was to switch weeks 3 & 4 of the reThink curriculum and have the breakfast on the beach week be our DI Friendzy event day. We would treat large group sort of like a "Rocky Horror Picture Show" where the small groups did things as the large group was going on... so when the storyteller was talking about fishing... and the host is fishing behind him/her... small group leaders were handing out gold fish crackers to their small group members... or we would stop and have some small group team competition where each small group had to play a fishing game (magnets on paper fish with a home made fishing rod) and the first team to get five fish in their bucket wins that competition. We would do various activities throughout the large group time that mimicked a Rocky Horror Picture Show feel while creating space for small group teams to compete and/or have fun together. We decided not to go this way, but I thought I'd share it anyway.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Wow great ideas Lisa! In light of the whole Friend-Pics application tool from the Family experience, we decided to rent an actual vintage photobooth, calling it our Friendship Photo Booth and encourage the kids to bring friends to take pictures with. We even got our logo and virtue definition printed on the bottoms of the photo strips. I found a local guy here in Dallas. You can check out greatamericanphotobooths.com to get an idea of what they offered. We also used 10 pieces of foam core board to spell out "Friendship" in front of our stage and encouraged the families to bring in photos of them with their friends to display on the board. So by the end of the month we'll have the photos spell out the word.
We're also doing a Bring-A-Friend Contest where we're keeping track of kids who bring new friends each Sunday and tally them on a big piece of foam core board, the"Friend-O-Graph", onstage. At the end of the month, the winner and their best friend will receive a 3 hour pass to Amazing Jake's, which has a video arcade, laser tag, bumper cars, etc.
Hope this helps!
Posted 1 year ago #
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