Saturday, July 14, 2012

Youth Group Skits

One of my jobs on the high school retreat I was just on was to come up with the Saturday night skits for the fifty-ish kids.  Knowing that improv can be fun, but is obviously hard to control, especially when I only knew five of the fifty kids, I came up with a plan.

We had six skits to be performed.  All of them had a scenario, characters, and a Bible verse that had to be included.  This allowed the kids some creative leverage and room to be funny, but gave them some structure (and the other youth group leaders and I some control over content).  The skits all need at least four people, but easily have room for up to ten depending on how they spread the characters out.

Click here for the six skits:
They all have a verse as a basis.  For example, Skit 1 is about the multiplication of loaves and fish, except it happens to take place in modern times in a McDonald's.  The group that performed this one, did a great job including both humor and the lesson- Jesus multiplied 5 hamburger buns and 2 filet-o-fish.

We told the groups that the could take liberty with the story and could perform it however they want- but that they had to emphasize the verse as if it were the only thing that everyone needed to remember.

I copied each of the skits on to a different color of paper (just so if the pieces got separated, they could easily be sorted), cut them out, and put them each in their own envelope.  Amazingly enough, I got them all back, without anything missing, after the performances.  However, you can see that the envelopes are a little wrinkled :)
For the kids who wanted a little more of a challenge, I also included about ten random improv lines from another skit we had done in Youth Group.  They could include them if they wanted to mix things up, or could stick them in their pockets and pull them out randomly. 
Click on the document below for those 75ish random lines.  You could use those for a whole other skit game if you wanted.

And to make it a little more fun, I brought along a "Skit Kit," with all kinds of random things to use as props.  Scarves, hats, toys, puppets- just stuff I had laying around my office.  Pack it in a tote, and watch things get interesting.
We had so many kids that we performed all of the skits back to back, but this would be fun to do once a week in a classroom or to have multiple groups perform the same skit to see what they can come up with. Enjoy!



2 comments:

  1. Katie,
    Thanks for all your creative ideas! Your website is a great resource!

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  2. This is awesome! New youth leader here and I have been struggling a lot with figuring out fun things kids like to do. Thanks for this!

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