I am the Primary President in our Ward (it's the program in our church for children 3-11 years old). It's been a fun calling. I work with great people and the kids are fun to be around. We had a Primary activity this last Saturday and wanted to center it around missionary work. I had heard of other wards taking an "airplane ride" around the world to various countries and learning about being missionaries. So my counselors and I had fun brainstorming ideas and came up with a fun activity (or so we thought!). We had a good turn-out (for our ward) and I think the kids had fun.
First, we had the kids enter the MTC. We talked about being "member missionaries" and then they each got a missionary tag. (below)
We had them go through airport security (I waved two light savers around the kids to "check" them!). If they had metal it beeped. :) We also checked their belongings under our (cardboard) x-ray machine. Then, they went to customs and recieved a passport so they could get it stamped at each country we visited.
Then, we boarded our "plane". We had several kids really concerned about getting on a real plane! It was cute. We reassured them it was for pretend. Our budget isn't that good! One of my counselors works for an airline so she was our stewardess. She did great. She did the whole speal and then they watched a church video on missionary work while they ate M&M's (member missionary). For each country, we had men from our Ward who served in that mission to talk about their country and then serve a treat from that country. We made stops at Chicago and tasted cheese pizza then, Venezuela and tasted mango, some sort of juice drink and fried bananas. Our next stop was in Germany where we had nutella and then to Japan where we had crushed ice, sweet beans and this milky syrup. (Not too sure what is was called.) We went back to the MTC where the Sister Missionaries bore their testimonies and that was it. We had other activities planned for the end like relay games, but flying around the world took longer than we thought. :)
