SO excited about this activity! This should be a super fun way of teaching the new program and all about how children should be choosing, setting and carrying out goals. In a nutshell, for your activity you will need to:
1. Prepare treasure pieces (prep)
2. Hide treasure piece bowls & clues (prep)
3. Give children map & send on treasure hunt
4. Meet back up after all pieces have been found
5. Goal Setting Lesson
PREP: about 30 mins
NEED: 10 candies per child, scissors and tape
This activity should take about 30 minutes total to prepare, however the preparation on this activity will depend on how many children you have participating. The bulk of the preparation is making the "treasure pieces" ... it took me about 2 mins to cut and tape the candy wrappers for 1 child. Really the only other prep work is hiding/spreading out the 10 bowls of treasure pieces and the clues.
TREASURE HUNT
The first part of the activity is the treasure hunt. The leader will need to prepare 10 "treasure pieces" for each child with candy wrappers that have the different goals on them. I made my candy wrappers to fit the candy "treasures", but as you can see from picture below, they fit pretty much any small candy (this was me using my kids leftover Halloween stash).
Then the leader will want to place all the pieces (1 for each child) for each category in a bowl (I used these Treasure Boxes - promise this is not an affiliate link, I don't know how to do that, but these did make it a little more fun) . SO ALL the "spiritual goals" treasure pieces for ALL children would go in the same bowl. If you have 9 children coming to the activity, you'll want 9 "spiritual goals" pieces of candy all in the same bowl.
The leader will then hide/spread these 10 bowls out. If I were in an LDS church, I would spread these out across classrooms… hidden if possible. Place the "treasure hunt clues" nearby the bowl to help guide the children to the treasure hunt pieces. On the treasure hunt map, it says "Don’t forget to Seek the help of the Holy Ghost” by looking for clues! They will lead you to the treasure pieces!" You can also say something like "make sure you choose the right" and only take 1 piece from each bowl. The treasure hunt part can go pretty quickly... if you want to stretch it out, I recommend hiding the treasure pretty well.
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The children knew to look in this room for a treasure box because of the
"Holy Ghost Clue" that was easy to spot in each room. |
Once the activity has started, give each child a “Treasure Map” and a bag (I actually glued the treasure map onto a brown paper bag). Instruct them to go get 1 piece for each item on their map. They will need to collect 1 piece from each bowl. Once all 10 pieces have been collected, meet back for a Goal Setting Lesson. Give them the “Congratulations” scroll.
GOAL SETTING LESSON
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| sorry the colors are a bit off on this example... promise the real this is correct! |
Before the activity, the the leader will want to tape up on a board or where everyone can see it, the scripture poster - put the two pages with the Luke 2:52 scripture together ( will need to cut of fold extra margin) and cut out the four words "wisdom, stature, God, man" so they are ready to be placed on the scripture poster.
Once everyone who completed the treasure hunt has the “congratulations” scroll, start the lesson by asking 4 volunteers to put the words in the correct place on the poster. Then post up the four goal categories and make sure all children understand the different categories. You can ask the children to take out the corresponding treasure piece out of their bag while you talk about it. Ask for examples of goals for each category (hint: there are some ideas in the back of the guidebook)
Next post up the four growth patterns (discover, plan, act, reflect). Use the “children’s goal setting” page shown below to help go ever each pattern. Point out that we also need to be working on memorizing and understand the articles of faith and living my gospel standards, which are both found at the back of the guidebook. At the end of the lesson, pass out the “Children’s Goal Setting” page for children to bring home to their parents.
For our activity, we laminated the "Children's Goal Setting" page on the back of the " Personal Development Goals" page and gave each child a dry erase marker. For my little eight year old, we have a magnet board in our house just for Primary Goals and he's able to pick goals and easily switch them out. At our activity, we also made sure everyone had a Children's Guidebook and our calendar for the next four months.
All my files for this activity can be found
HEREHere
