Rewritten

Last night at youth group we explored our creative side with words and music. Actually this idea was kind of forced upon us when our contemporary worship service band hosted a Sunday evening concert which ended just before our youth group time. It seemed like a good match for our kids to go to both, so we invited and encouraged them and treated them to pizza afterwards (the first 20 minutes of youth group).

Then we began our evening with a giant game of apples to apples. It worked well, but with 40 people there were a LOT of red cards to read aloud. I helped this small thing by having two leaders (myself and another senior) read the cards aloud so that the judge could just listen and then decide which was their favorite. It also worked well to have two green cards read aloud at the same time, two students then collected cards which were submitted for each. That helped speed the process of giving cards and distributing. We played about 5 green cards in 25 minutes.

Next we played a simple game called word association. While seated in a circle we just reacted to the word spoken by the person next to us with the first thing that came to mind. This was an especially fun game to loosen ourselves up with and a great match with apples to apples.

We followed up the games with an experience using the song amazing grace. Since it's written in common meter, it can be sung to tons of different tunes: Gilligan's Island, Pop Goes The Weasel, America The Beautiful, House Of The Rising Sun, Mickey Mouse Club, Yellow Rose Of Texas, Auld Lang Syne, Piano Man, Mary Had A Little Lamb, O Little Town Of Bethlehem, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, And My Favorite - You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch. Using spotify, I made a playlist of the karaoke version of these songs and one by one we sang amazing grace in all kinds of ways. It was silly, fun, and a little long. The students definitely were surprised at how many versions there were... I was too.

Then we broke into small groups (a change this time by not breaking into our consistent groups, just a random group that I numbered kids off for) and wrote new verses to songs that we already sing in our youth song book. Some of the songs were ridiculous, often making fun of my bald head, and others were more story-based, which was a lot of fun to hear. All the groups came back together at the end and we played each song the 'correct' way and then the 5 small groups sang their version of the song. It was a little difficult to hear the groups, next time I'll have them write their new lyrics on an overhead page and we'll just project the words on the wall.