3 Day Camp Strategies You Can Use on Sunday

At summer day camp, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make every minute of the day effective and fun for our campers. Here are three strategies we use for camp that you can apply to a Sunday service to make it even better. 

1) Keep It Moving!

Change up your activities and segments every few minutes during the service. There's nothing worse than a segment that goes too long. Your lesson planning and programming for Sunday services should be responsive to the ages and attention spans of your students. Keep your segments short. Transition between different levels of activity by having active and inactive segments. An active segment could be a game, hands-on activity, or a praise song with motions. An inactive segment is a skit, object lesson, offering teaching, or anything where students aren't directly involved. Mix the order of these segments so students don't sit as spectators for too long.

2) Don't Confuse Structure with Sameness

Having a basic structure for your services is a good way to help students understand what's expected of them. However, having a structure doesn't mean you have to do each segment in the same order every week. Try mixing up the schedule so your students don't get into a stale rhythm with your services. Try doing praise and worship last one week. Shake things up by having a large group game to start the service. Change it up to keep it fresh.

3) Find Every Way To Add Fun

Make every part of your service, from check-in to pick-up, more fun. No child has ever left a service saying "I don't want to go back there because it was TOO MUCH fun!" Constantly analyze what parts of your service could be more fun. Inject it into everything you do, and you'll find that students are more engaged and remember more of what is being taught. 

3 Camp Activities You Can Use on Sunday Morning!

Camp is filled to the brim with fun activities. Bring that excitement to your Sunday morning with these three activities, which are good for large or small groups. Let's get into it!

1) Joseph's Journey

This is the classic game of four corners, themed to reflect Joseph's life. Each corner reflects one four parts of Joseph's life: brother, servant, prisoner, and king. Play a normal game of four corners (rules below).

Have one child who is “it”. Assign four areas to be a corner. Each corner represents a time in Joseph's life: brother, servant, prisoner, and king. The person who is “it” needs to put their head down or have their eyes covered and count to 10 loud enough for all the children to hear. Have the rest of the group pick a corner quietly. When the person who is “it” finishes counting, they call out one of the corners without looking. The children in the picked corner are out. Play another round. This continues until there is only one person left. The winner gets to be “it” next.

Use this activity to talk about how God used every aspect of Joseph's journey and turned it into something good, just like Romans 8:28 tells us: "...in all things God works for the good of those who love Him..."

2) Togetherness Tag

In this game, children link arms and have to work together in pairs to try to tag or escape other teams. Use this game to talk about how we need to work together as a team, in unity. The rules are below.

All the children pair up. The teams lock elbows standing side by side. Pick one pair to be "it." The "it" pair tries to catch one of the other teams using normal tag rules. Each team may not unlock arms at any point, or the team is out of the game. Teams must communicate and work together to tag the other teams or stay away from "it." The last team remaining in the game that hasn't yet been tagged is the winner, and gets to be "it" next round. After a round or two, play the game with shrinking boundaries, where the play area gets smaller as more and more teams get tagged out.

Ecclesiastes 4:9 tells us that "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil." When we work together, we can accomplish great things!

3) Daniel's Lions Tag

Live out the story of Daniel and the lion's den with this game. Each player is one of three roles: an angel, a lion, or a Daniel. Set up two boundary lines, about 50 feet away from each other (if you're playing indoors, make the boundary lines the walls on either side of the room.) See the rules below.

Pick at least three players to be lions. The lions stand in the middle of the playing area. Pick at least one player (up to 3, depending on your group size) to be angels. All the other players are Daniels, and they stand on the outside of the boundary line on one side. On "go," the Daniels must run across the playing area and attempt to get to the other side. The lions try to eat the Daniels by tagging them. The angels try to protect the Daniels by tagging the lions. If an angel touches a lion, the angel says "be still!" and the lion must freeze for three seconds. If a Daniel gets across, he/she waits until the next round. If a lion eats a Daniel, he/she is out and stands on the side. Once all the Daniels get across, wait a few seconds and call out "go" again, making the Daniels run back to the other side. Continue until only three Daniels remain, who become the lions for the next game. If the game is too easy for the lions, add more angels. If it's too easy for the Daniels, take away angels or add more lions from the players who have already been tagged out.

This game is designed to last 15-20 minutes, making it a great way to reinforce the story after you've already talked about it.

Have fun with these activities, and don't forget to keep checking the Idea Factory! We post new ideas and tips every week.

You can also visit us at www.thespot4kids.com to see our summer day camp curriculum full of over 350 fun activities!