The Singing Time Olympics, Week 3

** I added a new section called, "Another Idea" if you return to this post after Friday afternoon.

Week 3 of our Singing Time Olympics came much too quickly for me, not in terms of preparing a lesson, but I wish I had more time to practice the feedback from the judges with the children. Sigh.

So, for Week 3, I will do the same thing I did for Week 1 - which is to bring back the Olympic judges to have them judge us on our performance.

The great thing is that if you haven't been following my Olympics theme for the last few weeks, you can just do this on this upcoming Sunday! I had fun with this but the "I didn't plan ahead" version of this activity is to grab a few friends to come be judges, have the kids sing the songs you are preparing for the primary program, and have the judges gives scores on well the kids sang each song, and what they need to improve.

Since I did plan ahead though, my version will be to put up all the decorative props I made for the first week of our Olympic games. The difference is that I will place a black box in the middle of the judge's table with a prize hidden inside (the gold medals that I ordered online). I will let the children know that I have something for them but that they need to score some 10s from the judges to see what's inside. Consider it to be a little mystery and motivation for the classroom, and also, something that to change it up from Week 1. Our kids are smart though, so I assume they'll know its medals. Any suggestions for a different way to handle this? I want them to know they are going through a second round of judging for a reason, and to feel excited and motivated, but not bribed.

Another idea:
I decided not to do this for various reason but I'll still share that:
The Idea Door had some great idea on the Olympics, that may have given me the solution for how I want to handle keeping children motivated and making the second round of judging seem especially different from the first. Her idea is about singling out three medalists to sing in the front of the room. I love that idea of how to single them out with the medals, but from there, I would bend it to this activity, which is: I might start handing out medals early, by having the judges each pick a gold medalist (or three, since I don't have any silver and bronze medals) to come up to the front of the room and receive their medal early after each song.  We can have surprise categories for the singled out medals for each song, like, "For this song, the judges picked 'most improved' or 'reverent.' The three surprise medalists are ..." Then, at the end, everyone else gets a medal, too so ultimately, nobody is left out.

(P.S. I really had four weeks of Olympics since I sneaked some of into singing time on July 18, when I invented the game of participating in an Olympic sport while you sing a song, e.g., be an Olympic archer and pretend to shoot an arrow while you sing. I've noticed at least one popular blogger copied this idea so this is a proud moment for me ... although of course, I am sad I wasn't given a credit, especially because I have seen other bloggers crediting her for my idea! I can't tell you how exciting it is for me when someone becomes a follower of this blog or leaves a nice comment. It keeps me blogging!)