Turkey Races/Mayflower Races

Happy Wednesday!!! I  have a couple of cute Thanksgiving Singing Time activities to share today. We won't be having meetings this week due to Temple dedication but I wanted to get these posted before time gets away from me. It seems with school activities, church activities and just plain simple life, I live in a whirlwind of craziness anymore. I am sure most of you can relate!!

Anyhow, I wanted to share these before it gets too late in the week. This first one (Mayflower Races)  would be fun for either Jr. or Sr. The prep is really, pretty simple. The hardest part is putting together your Mayflower paper boats, and even those are simple with the You Tube video I found today. You can find it on this site HERE

I would probably make about 12 of these for this activity. Here is the pic of the 2 I put together today. You can make these different colors and sizes if you prefer.

For this activity, you will want to make about 12 boats and put different page numbers on the flag. You can see that I did this in the pic above.

To start out, you will call up two children to race. They will each go to the dock and pick a boat and a straw. You will then have them put their boat down on the table to get ready to race.

At go, they will blow their Mayflower boat with their straw, whichever boat crosses the finish line first is your winner and song to be sung.

I will then put the loosing boat aside and if there is extra time you can race the loosing boats against each other at the end!!

This next activity can be used in a few different ways. I started teaching "Could I Hold the Baby" for our Christmas program on the 14th, so I will be using this as a motivator for my kiddos. This one is "Turkey Racing" and can be used for Jr. or Sr. primary.

To start out I made this board here:

I will have the Jr. primary race against me to see who can get to the finish line first. To do this, they just have to sing well and participate and they will get to roll a dice and move their turkey along throughout singing time.  If they get to where they are not being reverent and not participating, then I get to roll and move my turkey along. The turkey who makes it the farthest is the fastest at the end and wins the race. (they love this stuff and totally win every time)
For Sr, I will have the boys racing the girls. If the boys do well, then they roll, if the girls do well then they roll. If they get irreverent, then I roll and move them backward.
So simple yet the kids really love it and it keeps them focused and I have full participation the whole time!!! To me, that is music to my ears!! Nothing feels better, than leaving church on a Sunday and knowing the kids LOVED singing time that day!!

I hope this helps anyone in need of some ideas. I have a few more to share and hope to get to those in the next few days. Happy Singing this week!!