FHE Lesson on Paying Attention

Our girls have a tendency to not pay attention to their surroundings, which has led to broken things or people getting hurt. So Eddie decided we needed to do an activity to teach them to pay attention better. I went online to find something, but if you type in "teaching kids to pay attention", instead of activities, you get articles after articles about dealing with ADD kids. *sigh* I just wanted a simple game/activity!

So I just made one up.

First, I went through our cupboards and grabbed 24 various bowls. I separated out 8 of them and set them aside. Then with the remaining 16, I taped a tack to the bottom of each.

Then I put a tissue in each bowl, poking the points of the pins through so they were just visible.

In the 8 other bowls, I put a tissue in as well. These were our "safe" bowls.

Then I filled 8 water balloons for each of the girls and explained to them the rules. They were going to be timed to see how quickly they could place the balloons in a bowl. We told them that they needed to look at each bowl because there were only 8 bowls that were safe to put balloons in and that the other ones would pop them. Their goal was to try not to pop any, which would mean they needed to pay attention to the sharp pins sticking up.

Here is Lexi's trial. She did very well.

 And Carissa just didn't get it, but she had fun. 

We explained that when we aren't careful, things get broken. 

Lexi said she'd try to be more careful from now on :-)