Live Action Angry Birds!

I have a teen group.  I am so proud of myself for having a teen group.  I also love my teen group for just rolling with whatever I have planned, even if it is kind of lame.  This activity though was totally NOT lame and I want to throw a shout out to Heather Booth for the idea.

I made three city buildings out of shelving boxes for a summer reading program activity and recycled them for this program.  I also pulled a bunch of different sized boxes out of our friends bookstore closet to use as other buildings.  The hardest thing to wrangle for this program were the balls to make the birds.  Heather managed to find three different sized balls of the appropriate color for each of her birds.  I could not.  I was at our Target with my husband loudly lamenting the fact that I couldn’t find any regular balls.  We finally found some foam dodge balls that were perfect, just not appropriately sized.

ere are the illustrious birds along with one lone pig.  I blew up all of the green balloons and left them blank so the teens could create their own pigs, which they did with glee.  I set up the first level, if you will, just to get everything started.

I know, not super exciting.  They knocked it all down in no time flat and then got to work setting up a new level.

This is what they eventually came up with.

I was impressed.  This was definitely one of those activities that I though would run out of steam about halfway through the hour and we’d just sit around or play mafia or something, but no.  They played Angry Birds the WHOLE HOUR.  It was a hit.  I destroyed one of their creations by running straight into it and they decided they all wanted to do that too, so I let them do that.  Here’s a video of my assistant and some of the teens destroying one of their levels just so you have an idea of how it all worked.

If you are a little wary about this one, I would say as long as you have a relatively soundproof area (or don’t mind the noise) and lots of space I say GO FOR IT.  We had a blast.