SOS Olympics

I thought for our final Summer of Service (SOS) activity, it would be fun to do an Olympics celebration, to celebrate the Olympics and our summer of service, and to give some of the older children a chance to serve some of the younger ones. I had several creative, talented and hard-working friends as my "commitee," and I think we threw together quite an event!

We had these cards for all the kids to wear; there were 7 different stations (2 craft stations and 5 athletic stations), so we made the cards in 7 different colors, and these divided the kids into teams, largely by age. We also had numbered punch spots and punches at each station to make when they completed each rotation. We rotated 7 times (obviously), so each child got to do each station once; each rotation lasted about 10 minutes.

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We had five athletic stations, each manned by an older child:

1. An obstacle course: kids had to walk the balance beam, run through the water-and-ball-filled pool and jump in each hula hoop. They loved this, and got to do it multiple times in the 10 minutes (sometimes they went backwards or other variations):

2. Beach volleyball: this consisted of a beach ball and a badminton net. The younger children basically just played catch over the net with the ball, but the older ones really got into it - this was very fun to watch!

3. "Javelin" (pool noodle) throw; we had two noodles and they had two chances to throw; we had a tape measure to measure their longest throw-

4. Standing long jump:

5. Running event (didn't get any pics of this), but pretty self-explanatory.

Then we had two craft stations: making Olympic torches; we had previously spray painted empty toilet paper rolls and snow cone cups and then used a glue gun to attach them together, and then the kids could rip or cut various tissue papers to make the flames, and glue them in. These turned out so stinkin' cute!

And we made gold medals; these were metal lids from various jars, spray painted gold with a hole punched through. We had glitter glue and stickers for the kids to decorate their medals, and then red, white and blue yard to string through and tie them on-

And then we had a medals podium for kids to take a picture with their medals and torches. Again, so cute (I am so grateful for talented friends!)-

At the end, we served everyone Olympic-ring cupcakes-

And here's our happy group!

Thanks to everyone who made this so seamless, fantastic and fun! I am so pleased with how it came together, and I got a lot of great feedback. The kids just loved it.