Activity Days Jeopardy

So, I'm coming to the close of another school year of "Activity Days," the class of 8 to 11 year old girls that I teach at church.  It's crazy to think I've been teaching them for 3 years now.  Anyway, each year we plan a Mother/Daughter Activity and a Daddy/Daughter Activity, and our Daddy/Daughter Night is tomorrow.  I always have a hard time coming up with new, unique ideas for these two big activities each year, and this year was the same.  I was talking to Michael, telling him that we often do something similar for the Daddy/Daughter Night each year, and that I wanted to do something different.  He came up with a few suggestions, and one was Jeopardy.  I thought that was a great idea -- different than anything we'd done in the past.

I sat down a couple weeks ago to plan out the questions for the Jeopardy game (which, of course, took longer than I thought).  I searched for ideas online, and found lots of trivia questions about different church-related topics, and made up a few of my own.  I was feeling pretty good about it, until I quizzed Michael on some of the cool old pictures I'd found of past church presidents and apostles, and Michael had no idea who they were (and Michael's usually pretty good at that kind of thing).  So I realized that in an effort to make it hard enough to engage the dads, I had made the questions way too hard for the girls (and lots of them were probably too hard for many dads too).  So, last night I sat down with my boys and asked them all the questions.  I paid special attention to which ones were too hard and too easy for my 7- and 8-year-old, and removed most of the really hard ones.  I did leave a few of the hard ones so it can still be a bit challenging (and we can keep the dads from getting bored), and I also added a few pretty easy questions (so none of the younger girls feel like the whole game is too hard for them).

I also decided to add a few categories that related specifically to the girls in the class -- I thought they'd get a kick out of that.  So one category asks questions about the class members, such as, "Which three girls in the class all have names that start with the same letter?"  Another one has the girls' first and last names all scrambled together in nonsense words, and they have to figure out which girl it is.  For example, "magpie pearl" is Paige Palmer, and "enemy pilot" is Peyton Miles (I found a few different websites through Google that will create anagrams like these from any words that you type in).  And the last category has photos of a few of the girls from past activities -- they will be shown a zoomed in portion of each photo, such as just a girl's hands, and have to guess who it is.  The other categories are all church related: scriptures, name that temple, name that song, church history, who said that? (quotes by prophets), etc.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I did it all in Microsoft Word, and am planning on printing the questions, category titles, points, etc. and taping them to a wall or black board.  (I did think about doing it all on the computer -- it would have been cool to have some sort of Power Point presentation where each question and answer automatically appeared with a click of the mouse, I even thought of being able to play audio clips of hymns and have them guess the song names, but I decided to go the simpler route of paper and tape, and avoid the headache of trying to reserve the church projector, having to arrive early at the church to set up all the computer stuff, and the ever-present possibility that we could run into technical difficulty for one reason or another and the whole thing could be messed up.  Now I just need to see if I can mess with my printer and get all the pages printed -- of course my printer has to start acting up the day before I have to print all of this.  :)

Anyway, since I often search the internet for ideas about activity days classes, I thought I'd post all of the questions and answers, and a few samples of the different question pages.  (And yes, anyone is welcome to use any or all of these ideas for your activity days or youth classes, no need to ask).  Enjoy!