Activity Days: Articles of Faith

Our new years resolution for Activity Days is to focus more on the Articles of Faith. I've found this past year that we have fulfilled many of the areas for the Faith in God award but have somewhat neglected our focus on the Articles of Faith. We have added two girls to our group making our current roll call up to 10 girls ages between 8 and 9 years old and what a crew!!! Today I focused our attention on the Articles of Faith by first giving the girls the challenge to memorize all the Articles of Faith by the end of the year. I offered them a small treat at the beginning of each of our activities if they can recite one article of faith perfectly to me. I am hoping that after a few people start passing them off the others will feel the motivation if needed. We then played an Article of Faith matching game. I found this activity in the October 1996 Friend magazine which I printed off and glued to card stock, it was a bit small so I would enlarge it if you plan on using it. After our experience with the girls not really quite knowing the Articles of Faith yet, the idea at sugardoodle.net of using just the Article of Faith number and a keyword would have worked out better, especially with the review at the beginning. I also made flash cards of the Articles of Faith for the girls to use at home. This seemed to take up most all of our time and we weren't able to get to any other activities but there are plenty more games/activities using Articles of Faith that you can find.

Activity Days: Article of Faith Easter Egg Hunt

This idea came from the Sugar Doodle website and was a major hit with the girls. Katelyn hid the eggs for me and was a little too good at it! I included all three different ways of doing this activity! http://www.sugardoodle.net/Articles%20of%20Faith/AOFEasterEggHunt.shtml

1. Divide everyone into two teams. Place all of the articles of faith on the same color paper. Choose a color for each team. Place the articles in the eggs with the candy. Tell everyone that they may only keep the color of their team. If they find another color have them replace it into the egg and move on. When the team has assembled all 13 pieces of paper have them place the articles in order. So by now you know that you do not place a number on the article. The team has to work together to order the articles. First team to have all the articles in order is the winner. (Kate)

2. What I did was print two copies of the Articles of Faith cards without the numbers and cut them out into individual articles. I had 42 old plastic eggs, which I could divide by "warm colors" and "cool colors" (pink, yellow, orange and green, blue, purple) into 2 teams. I put each Articles of Faith in an egg, along with some candy, for the other eggs, I just put candy (no chocolate, because we live in AZ). Then I hid the eggs in my backyard. Each team had to find only their color eggs, and then, when all were found, dump out each egg into a bowl, get the papers, and number the articles from one to thirteen. Then they split the candy evenly into Ziploc baggies. (Amanda Evans)

3. I did one the other day that turned out pretty well. I divided each Article of Faith up into seven pieces. Then I numbered the eggs. Each girl was assigned specific numbers to look for. For example, one had to look for eggs number 1, 2, and 3. It was a lot of fun because they tried to not let the other girls see where they were looking if the egg wasn't theirs. Anyway, after all the eggs were found then we went in and tried to put them into order. I of course helped, I had a couple of older girls who happened to be there and so they helped the younger ones. After they were done putting them into order we read them out loud to make sure we put them together right. The 13th egg I divided so each girl had to find only 2 pieces of it and then we put it in order together. It was a lot of fun! (Cathy Updike)

I baked sugar cookies for the girls to decorate but they had so much fun finding the eggs and seeing who could solve the scrambled Articles of Faith that we just ate them without decorating and enjoyed the good weather instead! This definitely keeps them occupied and having lots of fun together!