Sole Shaped

Last night at youth group we invited 8th graders to join us for our high school youth group time, hoping to bridge the gap and energize students about getting involved once they are in high school. Consequently we had a large group show up and games, were planned to that accord. Also, because we had so many new students we had some extra ice breaker games.

We began the evening by having a very simple game of train wreck as students arrived. I thought it would be more welcoming to have students arrive and see something going on that was easy to connect with than having any lull in our evening. Train wreck is simple and quickly explained, but it does involve chairs, so we were constantly adding chairs to our circle and scooting backwards. It was a very smooth transition from this into our prayer/meal though.

After dinner we played another simple ice breaker called cartoon couples. During the game we put stickers on the backs of all the students and leaders and using only yes and no questions students had to identify themselves and then find their partner from their cartoon series. The only glitch was that I used batman and robin and robin hood and maid marian... but robin ended up with marian leaving batman and robin hood confused. other than that small trip up the game worked great and allowed kids to have a partner for the rest of the evening to play with, get to know, and build a relationship.

So everyone was sitting in partners and I asked partners to group together to form groups of 4 and then groups of 8 in order to play our next game - pictionary relay. It's a great game, one person has a master list of 30 words and in relay for, the teams send one person at a time to receive a new word, and then return to their team to draw the word. The trick to the game however is to make sure that after each guess, the person who guessed correctly comes up to get the next word and has to say the word that they just guessed correctly, that way the leader can give the next word in the sequence and teams can continue playing at different speeds. 30 words was a lot, but it was a good list of easy and hard. We made this game even more fun by separating the leader with the list of words across the fellowship hall, that meant lots of running for each group and a lot of hilarity.

During this game I took time to setup for our final game called Human Foosball. I've played this game a lot of different ways, but this was the most thrilling way that I've played it yet. with 46 people, there are a lot of small details to cover, but since they had already formed groups of 4 earlier that evening, I used those groups to create lines for foosball, each facing a different direction in the fellowship hall. I gave the end of each line a tube of waste hose that had been tied to a chair. Since the hose is stretchy, it allowed the line of people (all holding hands) to manuever back and forth just enough to kick the balls and be forced to work together. I also placed tables on their sides along the outside of the playing area so that there would be some fort of boundary. just like in foosball, it was difficult to get the ball when it was on the side of the court, the whole line had to stretch. We played this game for 20 minutes, which was action packed and very intense. It was a great game and everyone was involved the entire time because we had 5 balls rolling around the court. I think the only complaint was that it was so fast paced that you couldn't really watch the entire game, you were just kept playing. and since everyone was standing you had no idea when you team scored a point. that made the game a little smaller, it felt like you were playing with just 8 people (your line and the line facing you) but it was good regardless.

We closed our time together with a devotional time about shoes. Each of 9 shoes represented a different type of faith that you might have. I introduced the idea, then adult leaders each presented a shoe and read a short statement connecting the shoe style to faith (baby shoes for instance represented having outgrown your faith and ready to ask more questions). It was a good devotion and all the kids were focused and interested, but I should have given leaders their own postcard with the shoe descriptions on them. Instead I had them read from the same piece of paper, which took a little time as each adult found their place, and squinted in the dark to read. bigger font and more pages next time. Following the presentation of shoes, kids were instructed to talk with each other about which shoes represented their current walk with God and which ones they were tempted by. it was light, but effective.

Overall, a great night. even though confirmation was the day before, and it was mothers day evening, the bridging event was excellent. we had great energy and attendance and those 8th graders who came got a great taste of what they can experience this summer and next year.