Program: Once Upon a Time

If you love books about dragons and witches, daring adventures, and knights and princesses, this is the program for you. We’ll play games, make a craft, and talk all about our favorite fantasy books.

Grades: K-5

Budget: $20

Attendance: 18 (with four volunteers)

Games

For this program, we split the kids into two teams (red and blue) as they entered the room. All of the games were played in teams.

Balloon Joust: I hung four red and four blue balloons in two rows from the ceiling (about 10 feet apart). One kid from each team was blindfolded and given a foam sword. With their teammates giving them directions, the two jousters raced to hit all of their team’s balloons. Loud, but fun.

Fantasy Match: Each team was given 20 cards: 10 heroes and 10 villains from well-known fairy tales. The first team to match the villains to the correct heroes won.

Craft

Sock puppet dragon, from Activity Village: I bought a bunch of kids’ socks at the dollar store – I needed 20 socks, so I bought 12 pairs just to be safe. Total cost? $3, and the socks came in a variety of bright colors and patterns. We cut out wings and flames from card stock – I love fun foam, too, but it’s pricey and doesn’t glue down as easily as card stock. We did this craft as an assembly line – I had enough teen volunteers to staff each station, so the kids didn’t have to wait too long. Older participants pretty much did the craft on their own.

Magic wand: We did use the fun foam for this one.  To start, each kid wrapped some metallic ribbon around a small wooden dowel, with both ends held down by double-sided tape. We cut out one star per kid (if you have a star die-cut, USE IT) and let them decorate the star, then glued it to the top of the dowel. If you cut out two stars per kid, you can put them back-to-back and the wands will look nicer, but again, it was a cost issue. (They loved them anyway. Who doesn’t love a magic wand?)

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