Armor of God Game Idea

I was looking for a game to finish our Monday night girl's group (ages 6-12) on the Armor of God.

We first had the girls read the scripture in their bibles and then fill in the blanks in an Armor of God worksheet. We then, with the help of some pieces from the flannel graph Armour of God set had a discussion about each piece and they wrote about each piece on another picture worksheet. (Sorry, I wasn't in charge of getting the worksheets, so I don't know where they came from.)

I found this “Invisible Battle“–a life sized Battleship-like game on Children's Ministry.com.

Our adaptations:

Game Play:
If the square a girl was sitting on took a hit: they stood up, raising their arms shouting, “I will not be tempted!”  (In response to the devil’s (other teams) invisible “fiery dart” of temptation.) First team to hit all their opponents were the winners. Lots of fun!

Set-up:
Instead of a bed sheet, I hung a large 9'x12' black tarp from the ceiling (in our case I attached the tarp with Rubber Bungee Cords to the braces that held up a heating duct that ran along the ceiling). If you had a drop ceiling you could use Grid Ceiling Clips pictured here that were used to hang a tarp from the ceiling to create black light stage walls by Jaymie.

Instead of using masking tape to block out the squares we used kid's foam interlocking tiles (which we already had at the church).

For row numbers and letters I simply folded 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of cardstock in half, then cut them down the center, each sheet gave me two folded cards. How many cards you need will depend on how many squares you have. We needed 24, 12 for each team, as that was how many foam tiles we had. On the number cards I only wrote on one side. On the letter cards I wrote on both sides (one side the players could see, the other side the teacher could see). They stood up nicely for the kids to see and can be reused.

For keeping score (so each team knew where they'd hit):
I have a box full of 3" pre-cut circles in various colours someone gave me years ago. I gave each team leader 12 red circles. When their team shot at a square they put a red circle on their side on that same square, so they knew looking down, which squares on the other side they'd already shot at. You could simply have squares of coloured papers, again the same number as you have squares for each side.

Pictured below is our set-up.

I was thinking since we did this of how one might adapt it to focus more on life application.

Maybe have the players toss that invisible dart and if it lands on a player the teacher brings the hit player a bowl of life application situations to pick from, the hit player has to say which piece of armor would help them in that particular situation. If they get it right, they do as above, standing up, raising their arms shouting, “I have on my ________ so I can resist temptation!

If they get it wrong ..... they take a hit... and the other team gets to have another turn.