A fun game/craft/gift to review the fruits of the Spirit.

At church on Wednesday nights lately we have been learning/teaching about the fruits of the Spirit. This coming Wednesday is our last night of this subject and we want to do some review. We decided it might be fun to have fruit of the Spirit bingo and we would ask questions about the different fruits and the Bible stories we had studied to show an example of each fruit.

Yesterday afternoon one of my friends who is one of the other teachers was over and we decided to work on the game together. To make the Bingo sheets we cut a piece of cardstock in half (to 5.5" by 8.5"), wrote Fruit of the Spirit Bingo on the top and then made a 5" x 5" grid on the bottom. That left us with 25 squares. There are just nine fruits of the Spirit in Gal. 5:22-23 (We did do a simple 9 square grid for the really little kids but thought that would be to easy for the bigger ones) so we decided to use each fruit twice. We had already been associating a regular fruit with a fruit of the spirit like the list below:

• Love: Strawberry
• Joy: Orange
• Peace: Watermelon
• Patience: Pear
• Kindness: Grapes
• Goodness: Banana
• Faithfulness: Cherry
• Gentleness: Peach
• Self-control: Apple

Using two of each made 18, we then added a wild square in the middle (19) and then we decided to do two each of 3 different fruits (blueberries, pineapple and raspberry) and for those fruits we would just have general questions like: "Where is the verse about the fruit of the Spirit found?".

Our finished product is below.

I had figured we would draw each of the fruits and that was sounding a little labor intensive as well as taxing our artistic abilities and then I happened to remember that I had seen something about finger print fruit in a recent family fun. I started experimenting and we came up with the fruits above. For the Watermelon you use a big thumb print and then add lines with a marker, For the grapes you use a bunch of pinkie prints and add a stem, For the apple you have to overlapping finger prints and you add a stem and leaf and so on. We ended up have a lot of fun working on it and had some very colorful hands afterwards!! Remember if you make this that each playing card needs to have the fruit in different spots to make the game work.

Then we made 24 cards (2 cards of each fruit) and put fruit and the name (Love, Joy etc.) on one side of them. On the back side we will have a question that corresponds to the fruit on the front.

To play: Each person has a large bingo card and quite a few playing pieces like buttons or pennies (10 or so). One person will be in charge of the little cards, they will draw one and show it to the players and ask the question on the back. Our plan is that the question will be open to all players and they can work together at answering it. Then each player gets to put a playing piece on the corresponding fruit (since there are two squares for each fruit they get to choose the place that they want to put there button on). When somebody gets five buttons in a row they yell "Bingo" and they won the game. You would not need to have questions to make the game work but we wanted them to help with our review of what we had learned.

As I was making this I started thinking how this makes a nice frugal craft if you want to let your kids try finger fruits. It also could be a frugal gift for some child or just a fun frugal activity for your family.

For more frugal tips visit Frugal Fridays at Biblical Womanhood.