Game of Life Handout

My lesson this week for the girls at church was about the importance of gaining an education and learning all you can to prepare for the life in front of you.  When I was thinking about how to teach this principle, all I could think about was the game Life.  I HATE the game Life.  My kids LOvE to play that game, but for me, adding pretend student loans to my REAL student loans is not fun ;0}

Regardless, the game of Life is fun for kids, so I adapted my lesson so that we could play the game along with learning about life-long learning at the same time.

I wanted to make a little thought card that would remind the girls of the things we talked about.  After picking pieces apart in my mind, here is the Life game spinning wheel I came up with.

I took each piece of the wheel and made a silhouette cut file that corresponded to each color.  I have each cut file listed below available for free download from my Dropbox Folder.

First, I cut the green background with the Life-GreenBack file.  Then, I used the Life-Color file to cut one pie-like circle out of each of the 10 colors of vinyl used for the rainbow part of the wheel.  I recently purchase a variety pack of vinyl colors on Amazon and have LOvED having the selection lying around for times like this!

Lastly I cut the Life-White file to cut all the remaining pieces of the spinning wheel.  Once all the white pieces were cut out of cardstock, I stacked them up, inked all the edges, then glued the pieces in place.

TaDah!

A Life-like spinning wheel.

I printed out the thought cards and cut them apart, inking all the edges before reaching for the glue.

I just printed it on my home printer due to time, but really wish I had the time to have it printed up at Office Max.  The print is really so much sharper it is totally worth the hassle to have them printed.

The cut cards were glued to the front and I was ready to teach the lesson.  I thought for a while about putting the thought on the back, but I wanted the words visible from the front in hopes the lesson reminder would end up on a mirror or somewhere where it could be seen and remembered.

As far as the lesson played out like a game, I had the youngest girl in the room put the board together, the oldest was our banker.  One other girl was in charge of the cards.  We skipped any insurance or paying for lack of insurance.  I printed out the following prompt cards.  

Please note that my printer is on it's way out, and for some reason will not print a whole page :0}  I can usually get the first 2/3 of a page to print, so for these cards, they are only printed on 2/3 of the page {teehee}.  I just figured I would throw them on here so you can see what I used for the lesson part of a game turn.

So for game play, we divide the girls into two groups.  ***Please understand that you will not have time in a normal lesson schedule to finish if you have two teams.  My original plan was to have just one team and we would all be on the same team.  

Since the lesson was about getting an education, both teams went the education route and received their student loans.  When it was a team's turn, they would take a prompt card {the ones I made} and read them or the scripture listed on the card to the class.  For the scriptures, I asked them to read the verse{s} listed and then express in their own words what the scripture meant.  After that, the rest of the cards were quotes from an article I read and each is followed up by a question relating to the quote.

Once the card was read and question answered, or in other words, once their learning happened, they were allowed to progress through {the game of} life by spinning the wheel to determine the number of spaces they could advance.  For the sake of time {I was really trying to get through that game} each team actually went double the spaces rolled, still stopping their turn once they came to a stop sign on the board.  To make this clearer to you, If they spun a 6, they would move their car 6 spaces, do whatever it said to do on the space, then they went another six spaces and did whatever it said as well.

For the first half of the game, they pretty much came to a stop sign with every, to every other move.  Sorry if you have not played the game Life before.  If you haven't you are probably a bit confused about all my babbles.

Whatever event they landed on, they paid or collected the suggested funds, but they also had to name a blessing that might come from the listed event.  It was funny because one team landed on everything good, right up until they landed on "You had Twins!" anyway :0}  The other team had car crash after mishap pretty much the whole game.  Once, they spun the wheel and got a 10, but since the other team had the job of police officer{and the game states that if you are the police officer you collect $10,000 from anyone who rolls a 10 {gets caught speeding}}, and we were playing that you went twice on what you spun, the poor girls had to pay the $10,000 twice!

I passed out a "life" tile with each life experience after they listed what a blessing was for the given event.  Every once in a while the girls gave just amazingly insightful responses to the questions and were spontaneously awarded $5,000 for their fabulousness.  

Anyway, we got about half way through the cards and our time was up.  I drove the two cars together to the pearly gates at the end of the game and landed my huge bowl of Halloween candy smack in the middle of the game board.  I shared that even though we all have different circumstances in life, we all have the same reward for faithfully pulling through the good and the bad in life, thus every one got candy in the end.

This was a very successful lesson, I have to say.  I had more participation from my group of girls, and even adult leaders, than ever before.  We played, we talked and discussed, and really had a blast together.  

Let me know if you have any questions.  I would love to answer any you might have, otherwise, I am off to try once again to get some sleep.  I keep praying that this cold will go away and I can finally sleep through the night without a coughing fit forcing me out of bed.  I went to the doctor on Friday to get a prescription to help my symptoms, and they informed me I could not have an antibiotic for a sinus infection until I had suffered through it for 10 days.  Nice.  So, Tuesday I can finally go back to the doctor and get the medicine I need.  Looking forward to that!!!