Sunday, September 13, 2009

Rainy Day Review

Today in Junior primary I will be finishing up Singing Time Bingo that we started last week (see my last post). They only got through 10 songs, which was awesome review so it met my objective, but they didn't even get Bingo once so they were all begging me to bring it back this week. So...easy prep for me!

Sr. Primary, on the other hand, went through many more songs and several people got Bingo since they were playing with their own cards. So this week I planned something new for them. It has been a rainy week here in Texas and I've been busy with other things so I am doing a pretty simple activity today. Going with the rainy day theme, I printed off 8 clip art pictures of umbrellas and colored them different colors. Then I cut out 8 rain drops out of blue construction paper. If I was feeling up to it I would have put them on cardstock and laminated them so I could reuse them, but like I said, I'm going simple today. On the back of each raindrop I wrote one of our program songs, and on the back of the umbrellas I wrote a different way to sing the song:

boys only, girls only, teachers and leaders only, stacatto, acapella, stand on one foot, face the back of the room, and eyes closed.

I am just going to tape them all around the room and choose a child to pick a raindrop and an umbrella and then we'll sing that song. To add some excitement, I invited our missionaries to come and help me. I am going to give them each an old tie (donated by my husband) and cut their ties off as the kids sing well. I have been wanting to try that for a while and we have some really outgoing missionaries in our ward right now so they were happy to help.

Happy Singing!

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Singing Time Bingo

Preparing for the program is in full swing and I am really enjoying these final weeks of reviewing because I don't have to do much teaching, just play fun games and do some fine-tuning!

Tomorrow I am doing Singing Time Bingo. I have been thinking about doing some kind of a bingo game to really focus on certain parts of certain songs that we need to practice so I'm excited about this one...

I started by going into Word and typing out 24 short phrases from our program songs with fill-in-the-blanks. I was able to do 2 or more from each verse of each song that we are singing. For junior primary I am making one giant bingo card on poster board. I'll have a child choose a strip of paper out of a basket and read it (or have their teacher help them read it). Then they'll have to fill in the blank and find that word on the bingo card. Then we'll sing that line of the song. The advantage with this game is that we can really focus on small pieces of songs. I think that will help my primary kids a lot, rather than just singing the whole songs all the way through.

For Senior primary I decided to make them individual bingo cards and let them play their own. I found this awesome website that makes custom bingo cards for free. There are several (I just googled "bingo maker") but this is the one I used and it worked great: http://edubakery.com/Bingo/ You just type in your 24 words and it makes up to 50 different bingo cards and you can customize how many you print on each page, etc. How easy is that?!

I may just pass out a crayon to each child and have them color in the squares as we go rather than having markers for each square. It's simple.

Can't wait!