Battleship for Primary

I'm the Primary Chorister in my ward (a congregation). I think it's a blast! There are tons of awesome blogs to read for fun and creative ideas to teach the songs. Today I chose to do Battleship. I got the idea from a blog called, "Diving Secrets of a Primary Chorister".

Here is what my board looked like. It's not as good as I hoped, but it will do. I used Tempra paint, but I guess I should have tried poster paint or something. Then, my loving husband Brian, helped me make the game pieces since he knows Excell and Power Point better than me.

I divided the poster into 9 rows, and 7 columns. That way, I had a nice border. I realized after I painted it all that I forgot to put the letters and numbers on both sides. Whoops! It worked anyway. As you can see from the picture, I put the numbers 1-7 across the top, and A-E down the side. There is a teacher supply store here in town, and they laminated my poster board for me for $3. I got 2 packages of Sticky-Back Velcro from Wal-Mart (in the craft/sewing department). I cut the Velcro into squares, and put the soft side on the poster board. After printing all of the game board pieces on cardstock, I took them to my Primary President's house to laminate (she bought a laminating machine). I put the rough side of the velcro on the game pieces so I could attach them easily.

This is what the finished product looks like. I made a key, and printed it on cardstock. This was one of my layouts. The black circles represent the 1st verse of "As a Child of God." The yellow circles are the 2nd verse, Blue stands for the 3rd verse, and the green ones are Sea Mines. When you hit one of those, you get to do a fun song. For Junior Primary, our fun songs were "Popcorn Popping", "Roll Your Hands", and "Give, Said the Little Stream". For the Popcorn song, every time the kids said the word Popcorn, they had to pop out of their chairs. For "Give, Said the Little Stream", I had them stand up or sit down each time they said "give", and they had to clap every time they said a word that started with "S". The kids really loved it! Senior Primary didn't do "Roll Your Hands". I figured they would feel too babied, so I had them do "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes."

When the kids hit one of my ships (black, yellow, or blue), they had to answer a question about that particular verse of the song. This was such a GREAT way to get the kids to sing the same song over and over, but still have fun. I'm actually really pleased with how it turned out.