Chopped YW Activity

For our latest Young Women Activity, the girls really wanted to do a "Chopped" competition. They have been asking for quite some time, so we finally put it together.

We did it a little different than the show though. We only did a dessert round and no one was chopped. There was an award for every team. Here are the details:

First, I divided them into four groups. They didn't get to choose their groups. I had them draw their colored groups from a bucket. I had a dishware set that included two plates and one bowl in four colors. That is the way we identified the groups.

Next, I told them the rules. They had 30 minutes to make a dessert. They were told they would be given four mystery ingredients. They had to use those four mystery ingredients and then they could use anything I had on the counter. If they needed something else they could ask and if I had it my pantry or fridge, they could use it.

There were special conditions though. I had a little trivia game before we began. The trivia game was to give some penalties to other teams. If they answered the question correctly, they could choose the punishment for another team. Every team had to have a punishment. *see files at the bottom

They were divided in their groups and then given the chance to open the mystery ingredients. I told them they could start and so it began.

They had a lot of fun making the food. Some people asked to use the blender, others wanted to use the stove. I was there to help accommodate and make sure nothing got broken. :)

Here were the final plates:

The final part was the judging round. I invited some of the young women turning 12 this year to be the judge. My husband ended up being a judge too since one of the girls couldn't make it. They were to give out 4 different prizes, 1 to each team.
Best Overall,
Most Creative
Best Tasting
and Best Appearance
I printed my little awards on regular paper and then taped them to a foam board and cut them out.
I gave the judges a whole bunch of forks so they didn't have to double dip in any plate. :)

I couldn't pass up my husband's face in this picture. Sums up the judging pretty good. 

Overall, it was a great success! The girls absolutely loved it! If we did it again I think we will try a main dish.

Here are all the files we used for the decor, judging, etc. Feel free to use for yourself! Just right click each image and save it. Then you will be able to print them. Each picture is an 8.5x11 sheet of paper size. I'd love to hear how it went!

Files for the Banner

If you happen to have a larger group, here are some extra awards and another judging sheet! :)

Young Women Halloween Party

This week we decided to do a Halloween party for the girls. We combined with the Mia Maids since the Laurels had a stake activity. It was fun! We kept it pretty simple.
We picked up a few pizzas and a couple things of breadsticks. We also had some hot chocolate there too. The girls wanted to make some sugar cookies-but not just any sugar cookies. They HAD to have swig sugar cookies. Swig is a place here in St. George that sells drinks and you can add any flavor shot to it. They also have some trendy cookies too.
I used the COOKIE recipe on THIS website. The only thing I did different was baked them at 375 degrees for 11 minutes. I tried the frosting on that website before, but it was a little too sour creamy for me (even though it's the closest thing to swig). Instead, I used the FROSTING recipe from THIS website. Instead of dying the frosting pink, we did black and yellow.

We also had a word Halloween game the girls played when we first got there. Afterwards, we just hung out, ate pizza and decorated cookies. Towards the end the girls decided to play a game of mafia.

A nice, simple activity :)

Young Women Activity

This week our YW activity was supposed to be just a class activity. However, the rest of the girls decided they wanted to come too! We are so excited to go and do this activity together! We are kind of keeping it simple this time. Simple is good sometimes anyway :)

We are going to go the corn maze here.

Here in St. George, Staheli Farm has an awesome fall activity area they do every year. I'm sure it's like most of the farms around the country. They do a corn maze, a haunted corn maze, a pumpkin patch, hay rides, train rides, and all that fun stuff.

Just an idea if you're needing one!

Random Acts of Kindness

I was in charge of the combined young women activity this month. Since the theme of this month is to be more Christ like, we decided to do something that can help us become more Christ like. We followed a theme of Random Acts of Kindness.

The activity:
We divided into groups that split up and went to various parts of our neighborhood/ward. I had a few things ready for the girls to just take to people. Each group grabbed a few things.
The assignments and/or stuff I gave ideas to do were:

• take bubbles to the park and either give them to kids playing or leave them for the bubbles to be found later.
• deliver homemade cookies to different people
• pass out root beer with the saying "we are rooting for you" to any they know that might be competing in something. Or someone that might just need a root beer :)
• Wave and say hi to everyone they see.
• Write chalk messages on the sidewalk
• bring garbage cans up to people's houses (this worked out nice since today was garbage day)
• pick garbage up if they saw it
• write anything to make them happy
• anything they felt inspired to do

The only rules were that every girl had to do at least one thing.
These were some of the handouts I did...

Afterwards we went back to the church. We put our chairs into a circle and had the girls tell me what they did and how it made them feel.  It was really cool to see who they delivered stuff too. Most of it was just to some random strangers. I was so impressed. One girl had the idea to bring bubbles to a house with a bike and knock on the door and run. So many people left chalk messages, a group of girls pulled garbage cans up. The stories were so neat to hear!

Then we played a game with some yarn. I started and threw the yarn to someone. When I threw it to them I had to tell them when thing I admired about them. They wrapped the yarn around their wrist and threw it to someone else and did the same thing. At the end, the whole circle was a big web. Everyone had something nice said about them, and everyone was able to complete a last random act of kindness. I mentioned that even though we are all different we can all have something nice to say to one another. Let's be more Christ like and look for the good in others, not the bad. Our YW president also gave a great message. She said that everyone
is good at something. If we look to the person sitting next to us we can find something they are better at than us. It was fun to see the girls all in a circle and talking nice to one another.

I gave them this handout and then had rice krispie treat balls as snacks.

Black Light Party

Our beehive group was in charge of the combined young men/young women activity. The girls have been dying to do a glow in the dark party. With Halloween here, we thought this would be a great idea!

You can purchase a customized invite on my Etsy shop here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/174122724/glow-in-the-dark-party-customizable?ref=shop_home_active

We didn't do much set up to keep it simple. We made a few poster boards with some neon paint. We also had three big black lights and 1 strobe light.

We started out with a devotional on the talk made my Elder Uchtdorf called " Tge Hope of God's Light. We did this devotional with the lights dimmed and the black lights on.

With the devotional we served the refreshments. It's always hard to gather everyone up towards the end. We served sherbert ice cream and then poured some sprite over it. We Put a glow stick underneath the cup to make the cups glow. They were all different colors so it looked cool.

After the devotional we played some games. The color of the glow stick they had determined the team they were on. We thought about glow in the dark volleyball, but then changed our mind to do some team building activities. We divided them into five different groups and then played these games:

Human Knot: They put their hands in a circle and hand to untangle the knot. This was fun because it was in the dark.

Rock Paper Scissors Dragon: Our ward always has a tournament during it's ward campout. I thought this game would be fun to do, but just adding on something a little different. In their groups they found someone to play rock paper scissors with. If they lost the round, the grabbed onto the shoulders of the winner. That group played another group and the losers would then add on to them. Finally, they have to play all the other teams until the champion is at the front of the chain.

Tape Ball: I didn't use tape on this. What I did was wrapped up some candy and glow bracelets and other knick knacks I had laying around. I used cling wrap and wrapped it into a ball. I made sure to have some spots full of cling wrap. Their were 2 people rolling dice in each team. When someone got to doubles they could have a turn unwrapping the candy.

 

 

 

Ooga Booga: For this game we divided the big group into two big circles. They held hands and then looked down and called out "ooga booga, ooga booga, and then looked up and said "ooh" When they looked up they had to look at someone in the eyes. If that person was looking back then they were both out. It was fun because when people started to get out, they started doing games of their own.

We also had a girl who does photography in our ward volunteer to take some cool pictures. She found a dark place and had the kids make different shapes with the glow
sticks. There were some cute ones!

We had the kids and leaders say this was an awesome activity. We definitely had a lot of fun!