Wednesday, January 2, 2013

1st Community Wide Review Party!!

Over this past summer, I had this idea.  How do we make review fun for the kids?  I had a few thoughts, actually. One was to start Wonderful Wednesday's and open my home up to family's in my class, to help "mentor" and provide opportunities for them to see how to flesh out memory work in a fun environment.  The kids are learning and enjoying the material and putting "legs" on it so to speak, and the Mom's are able to talk and discuss various topics related to the memory work and see what I'm doing or idea share what they're doing to build out their week's memory work.  I had an idea  to do Review Parties at our local Community.  Here's what we did...



We had our first Review Party in November!  It was a lot of fun.  The kids enjoyed the games and the parent's seeing how well the kids did!  We are having a 2nd Review Party towards the end of this 2nd semester.

Here is what I did if you'd like to see if your Community would be interested in doing one!

1.  I formed a committee of parents willing to idea share/brainstorm games and ways we could execute/organize the kids for review in teams with a large group.

2.  Came up with a fun way to end our Review Party - we did a Pizza Party!  We had parents bring the drinks/deserts to share and then we ordered pizza.

3.  I assigned parents who were willing to help, various jobs that needed to be done (I couldn't do it all!) and they became responsible for that game or area.  

4.  Promoted it at our morning assembly time and on any of our social communication groups our Community used (we use yahoogroups).

5.  Set up a database and a sign up sheet for families to sign up in advance -providing a deadline for when the sign ups needed to be completed by.

6.  Sent out a final notice to our volunteers letting them know what areas they agreed to be responsible for and what their duties were for that area.  Had everyone show up early to set up and then asked some in advance to be willing to help tear down/clean up.

The games we came up with were:

Are You Smarter then a Parent - we did the kids against a panel of parents.  I moderated the questions back and forth.  They enjoyed this and were motivated to "beat the parents" at their memory work!

Geography Race - we used two larger maps and I had two pointers.  They were formed into two teams and then made a line.  The first person in each line went to the map and turned their back to it with a pointer in their hand, then the location was called out by me and the first person to spin around and locate it was awarded points for their team.  We had two moderators watching the kids to raise their hand when their kid hit the right location.

Timeline Freeze Dance - this became a fun hand motions event, actually.  The kids all signed the entire timeline they had learned up to the current week.  They did GREAT!  Myself and another Mom who's great with the hand motions, stood in front and did it with them to the music.

Lastly, we all had pizza and desert to celebrate!  Below are some pictures from our Event.....































3 comments:

  1. How wonderful! We loved doing the Geo race at our review party. And how great to end the time together with pizza! We look forward to another review game day towards the end of this second semester as well. Love your ideas. Blessings!

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    1. Megan - It has been so neat to see how God has used this idea to motivate so many Communities around the Country to do something similar. It's neat! So glad your Community is enjoying them! Blessings - Colleen

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  2. Where did you get the poster size black line maps and how much? Nice!

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