Articles of Faith Easter Egg Hunt

Last year I did this Easter activity with the girls. This year I am planning to do it with the boys. Have the children go on an Easter Egg Hunt. They hunt for candy eggs and Articles of Faith eggs. I had six children in my group and so I used 36 plastic eggs. Print out the articles of faith and cut them up into "somewhat short" segments. Stick several segments into half of the eggs and put candy in the other half of the eggs and then hide them around the church building or yard. 
Tell the children to go find all the eggs and when they get back, split into two teams. Place all the Articles of Faith segment strips into a pile (and then they got to keep the candy to eat). This worked well to have them working in two groups, and each group can have a leader to help. Some of the children will be better at putting the phrases in order and some will like gluing the phrases onto a paper that someone else has put in the right order. Click here for the page to print with the Articles of Faith.

Activity Day

When I was an activity day leader during March we talked about service. Our primary had all the 8 to 11-year old boys and girls come to the church and do the weekly cleaning for one of our activities. A service scavenger hunt would be fun-make sure each group has a leader with them and that the girls know not to go inside of any homes. Some ideas of service include: sweep porch or walkway, read a story to a child, bring in garbage can, play a game with a child, pull ten weeds, sing a song, wash a front door, pick up trash from the front yard. Here is a fun game where they can serve each other.

Frozen Bean Bag Game: The children begin by moving around the area balancing a beanbag on their head. If a player's beanbag falls, they are frozen until another player picks up the beanbag without losing their beanbag to free the frozen player. Each player keeps track of how many players they have helped. The object of the game is to help as many of the other players as you can.

We also did a fun kitchen craft making spring chicks from deviled eggs:

(I used bits of olive for the eyes, and bits of carrot for the beak)

Cub Scouts

For our den this month we are learning to use tools. They boys had lots of fun pounding nails, driving screws,  sawing boards, and drilling holes with a hand drill. I am lucky to have the old fashioned hand drill that my father gave me many years ago. To build something useful, our two wolves made a flag stand for our little flag we use each week in den meeting.

The boys had to cut the wood with a hand saw and then drill a hole for the flag. The bears were able to pass off the requirement to demonstrate how to use tools.

Our bears are also working on the jot it down requirement this month. They made a list of things to do and we are planning on having them write about what we have been doing in our den this month for our church bulletin. They wrote thank-you notes when we did the good manners belt loop and I am planning on having them write thank-you notes to the mothers for mother's day.

We will also pass out Scouting for Food bags around our neighborhood for a service project. Our local hardware store does a kids workshop once a month, and most of our boys went and made something from wood this month. Making something from wood also is listed under developing talents in the Faith in God book.

Activity Day

When I was an activity day leader I used February and President's Day to learn the 12th Article of Faith and talk about patriotism, what it means to be a good citizen, and how their actions can affect others. (This fulfills a Faith in God requirement from page 9 of their book). The girls learned how to fold a flag and what our rights and responsibilities as citizens are.

We played a fun game where sitting in a circle each person shared somewhere they have seen a flag displayed. The first person says "I've seen a flag flying at ____". Each following person says "I've seen a flag flying at (repeats all previous places, and then adds a new place)".

There are lots of cub scout resources for patriotism. I always figure that the girls can have as much fun with cub scout games as the boys do.

Cub Scouts

For February den meetings, we worked on the collections achievement (wolf) and elective (bear). We decided to do penny collections since we could do that in den meeting at a minimal cost. I printed up card-stock sheets with spots for the pennies for each year the boys had been alive and also for the years their parents were born. They had a lot of fun sorting through $2.00 worth of pennies to find the right ones.We used a handi-tac type product to stick the pennies to the card-stock. We talked about the type of things they could collect and I showed my son's patch collection and a couple of other collections from my family. I collected several items that they could collect and displayed them on a tray (stamp, postcard, toy car, rock, mug, sea shell, quarter, magnet, stuffed animal, leaf, etc). After discussing each item, I covered them up and had the boys write down the ones they could remember.

We also made puddle jumpers with the boys (I learned that the cans are not as strong as they used to be). We had a friend of one of the parents who brought several collections to share with the boys. We held onto the boy's penny collections so they could show them off at pack meeting. Here's a photo of the sheet I made for each boy: