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Joy is Contagious Game for our Character Development Series

3 Comments As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.


This idea utterly failed for us today, but I’m going to make that claim that it isn’t because
it’s a bad idea. Because I believe it’s a good game I’m going to share it, and then I’ll share why I believe it failed for us today.  

Joy is Contagious Game
As I was reflecting on the fact that joy can be contagious, I decided I wanted to come up with an idea, craft or an activity that reflected that. I came up with a version of tag I thought would be fun. 

I had some garage sale type stickers left over from our dot sticker art. I wrote joy on four sheets of stickers. Then, I removed the stickers and re-arranged them so that one sheet had all yellow, one had all blue, one had all red and one had all green (note…this was one my mistakes). 

Each child received a sheet of stickers. I talked about the concept of what “contagious” means. We then had a discussion on how it relates to joy. The rules of the game are that you chase people around for one minute trying to stick a joy sticker on them. At the end of the minute, we stop and see who was able to spread the most joy by adding up the stickers of their color. Great concept, right?

OK – so what went horribly wrong? I guess a good indicator of how an activity might go is when it takes the kids 20 minutes to figure out how to get out of the house even though they were already in jackets and shoes. If one child decides to change shoes and can’t decide which ones fit or what exactly what they want to wear, that’s a good indication things might be headed south. Let’s pretend that while said child is having a meltdown over shoes another child starts having a meltdown for no apparent reason, it might be a good warning sign that now is not a good time to play the game. So, I said that…”Now is probably not a good time. We can play later.” Oh, but they wanted to play so bad, so we pressed forward. Another thing that went wrong was that in transferring the stickers around to different sheets of paper, they lost their stickiness, so stickers were dropping off and falling to the floor. They wouldn’t necessarily stick to clothes. I would suggest just cutting the stickers in strips and handing the kids multiple strips. You could also use different colored sticky notes or different kinds of stickers for each child. The final blow to the game was the fact that these now non-sticky stickers were barely hanging onto their page and then we got huge gusts of winds while we attempted to play with a child who is still melting down. Well, there’s the utter disaster of the game that did not bring us much joy. The irony was not lost on us. 

 More Joy Lessons in our Character Development Series 

Joy is the Word of the Week

Joy Word Ring
Choose Joy Car Game
Choose Joy Bean Bag Toss
Joy Filled Up
Joy Puppet Show
Choose Joy Artwork
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Filed Under: Character Building Tagged With: Bible, character, Christianity, faith, Jesus, joy, kids, Preschool, teaching

Previous Post: « Self Portrait Andy Warhol Art Created with Markers
Next Post: Kindness “I Will” Statements – Character Development »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Amanda Taylor

    February 24, 2013 at 6:04 pm

    I think the idea is good, but I can agree that it could be improved or use differently.

    Reply
  2. Courtney@BooksnBoys

    February 22, 2015 at 8:19 am

    I think this is an AWESOME idea! Great visual and active fun combined. I am excited to use this for our Awana Sparks group – I think it will be very memorable! Thanks so much!

    Reply
    • jodidurr

      February 22, 2015 at 3:32 pm

      That’s so great to hear. I hope it goes over really well. I’m glad you found me. 🙂

      Reply

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Parenting is not easy, but it is so important. My goal is to help inspire and equip parents in a more intentional, creative and enjoyable parenting experience.

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More About Jodi

Jodi has a degree in education and is now a stay-at-home mom of three. She has used her experiences as a teacher, private tutor, camp counselor and youth worker and applied it to her parenting experiences. The classes she has taken in psychology, teaching kids, parenting, art and marriage all contribute to her parenting style and philosophy. She is a constant student of this thing called motherhood. Meaningful Mama embraces her passions for Jesus, motherhood, entertaining, creativity, and the culinary arts.

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