First off, I must say this was the second time I did this activity, and each set of girls really had fun with it. We started off by talking manners. We went over many places we need manners, and the basics of phone etiquette, dinner table rules, answering the door, speaking to adults, etc. This cute printable was a good starting point to go over with them.
Then, I gave them a place setting to cut out and show me how they thought it was supposed to be set. After I revealed the answer, we glued them on a paper and labeled them to put in their binder for future reference.
The cute printables can be found Here.
Then, to put things into practice, I brought out some bowls of finger foods (we have our activity on the kid's early day from school right before dinner, so I didn't want to stuff them!). I had carrot sticks, olives, strawberries, grapes, cheese cubes, and some goldfish crackers. The girls had to show me they learned their manners! I had them set a place setting for themselves, make sure they were saying please and thank you, passing the food the correct way (clockwise), watching elbows, etc.
After we were done, we had a few minutes left, and I shared some fun etiquette facts with them from some other countries. Such as this... (Here is the link)
Another successful activity! Today I decided to talk a little about music with the girls. We talked about music and how there was uplifting music and music that can chase the spirit away. Then, I showed the girls a short clip (about 3 minutes) from lds.org (link HERE).
Then, we made our conductor batons. I got some dowels from Walmart (any craft store should have them) and found these foam marshmallow-looking things from Michaels. Before the girls came, I had the dowels already painted and put 2 foam shapes on the end and hot glued them on.
I let the girls bedazzle their handles with some gems (I bought a big thing of gems at Hobby Lobby 2.5 years ago when I got this calling and have used it countless times...the jar never seems to get any smaller!). After that, we had a lesson on why leading music is important. We talked about it is a skill they will use in Young Womens, future callings, as missionaries, etc. It is a good skill to have and easy to master.
We went through each of the different counts and how to perform them. I found THIS fantastic guide to leading music that I printed off for the girls to keep in their binders for future reference. We went through some different primary songs that had the different counts to learn the movements. Some links to the songs are found HERE.
We ended up by writing thank you notes for our primary chorister and pianist, and I bought some Symphony bars to take to them.
We of course ended up with a quick treat. I saw this cute variation to the pretzel/rolo treats somewhere and thought we'd try them out. Yum :)
