Counting Down to Halloween #7

Works for Me Wednesday

Games for Teenagers

One of our newer Halloween traditions takes place early in the morning at seminary. It's typically a "scripture mastery game day" with the activities taking on a Halloween twist. This year Brad's substituting as Michelle's teacher, and he decided it'd be fun to do a spider web relay. (This isn't happening until Friday, so keep it a surprise from the teenagers!) He'll build a web using tables, chairs and rubberbands. The kids will need to crawl through it - after putting on a simple costume and without touching any of the attached spiders - to reach a pumpkin with a scripture clue on it. Then they'll run back to their team, remove the costume, and everyone will look up the scripture. Then it will be the next person's turn. (I may not have it totally correct, but you get the idea.)

Blog posts are always more fun with a picture. This really has nothing to do with games for teenagers, but it does show a teenager-approved activity, and it's the inspiration for the relay race. Here's a picture showing the results of "Operation Stretch-n-Pull" or rubber-banding a friend's dorm room.

Last year we darkened the church hallways and sent out pairs of students with a flashlight. They had a list of scripture clues and we had the answers posted on numbered bats all over the classrooms. They had to use their flashlight to find the bat and match its number with the correct answer (leaving the bats in place for the next team to find).

Most group/relay games can be adapted to scripture mastery, or any educational endeavor. Just ask a question that needs to be answered before the next step of the game. One of our favorites is a variation of Fruit Basket. In the original game you sit in a circle and are assigned one of four fruits. One person is "it" and doesn't have a seat. He calls out one of the fruits. If "apple" is called, all the "apples" have to change seats, and "it" tries to get one as well. The person left without a seat is the new "it." Calling out "fruit basket" means everyone has to switch. To adapt this to scripture mastery, we assigned a scripture instead of a fruit - for example, Matthew 5:14-16, John 14:15, Romans 1:16 and James 1:5-6. "It" would call out a clue - "love one another" or "ask God" - and those who had the answer would have to change seats. Every once in a while he could call out fruit basket just for fun.

One last one, which is really the first one I discovered, is called Pocket Scavenger Hunt. I first played this at a family reunion where we had several groups of 15-20 people. One person on each team was designated to be the runner. The moderator would call out an item - such as a comb, an old driver's license, a button, or fingernail clippers - and everyone would try to find the item and give it to the runner to take to the moderator. The first person there got a point for his team. For holidays, just choose holiday-related items. And in seminary, we'd add a finding a particular scripture (having them written on cards and passed around to the team members helped keep the Bibles intact) to the other "scavenged" item.

Having fun with teenagers works for us. Feel free to ask questions if I didn't explain things clearly. And feel free to check out We ARE that Family for even more fun ideas.