Making Wonderland: Part 2

Follow The White Rabbit
After everyone had arrived and the votes for best dress has been cast, the Wonderland trivia sheets had been filled out, and the puff pastry's had been munched (minus a few of the mushroom ones, it seems only another leader and myself like mushrooms, which is awesome because that means there were more for me and mushroom ones were yummy) it was time to follow the White Rabbit down the rabbit's hole....
The "rabbit hole" was a large table with garbage bags taped to the sides creating a dark tunnel affect with the bags at the entrance and exit where cut in strips to make "doors". The "tunnel" was in front of a classroom with has a split door. We kept the top closed and opened the bottom half of the door. So you had to crawl through the tunnel to enter "Wonderland Garden." But before you could enter you had a choice to make:Through out Alice's adventures her height changed based on what she ate or drank. To bring that detail into our evening I had two bottles to choose from. One would make you "bigger" the other would make you "smaller" but you didn't know which was which until after you had made your choice and crawled through the hole. To show your choice you took "drink me" token that matched the color of the bottle you picked.

Wonderland Garden
When you entered the room you discovered a table already set. Every other chair was a tiny preschool chair with small dishes set in front. We used the preschool craft tables. The other chairs adult size with larger plates in front of them. You had to sit in front of a plate that had a token with the same color as your "drink me" token. Green tokens read "you grew smaller" so they sat on large chairs which seemed enormous next to the preschool table and eat off big plates. Blue tokens read "you grew taller" so they had out grown the chairs and sat on the tiny kiddy chairs and had to use small dishes.To create a other-world-wonderlandly atmosphere we replaced all the florescent lights with black lights (courteous my youth pastor friend Tim Long). We had a few familiar Wonderland characters on the wall that illuminated well.The center pieces were my favourite. To go with the "talking flowers" Alice meets in the garden we glued googly eyes on fake flowers before making the arrangements:
In the garden we enjoyed our first course of garden salad. There was nothing special about the salad it was green had veggies and bacon in it. I enjoyed it. Many of the youth who are "allergic" to green food did not.

What I liked about this course was the drink. The day before we had made juice ice cubes. I used four different colour/flavours of concentrate and didn't add as much water as the can called for to make our ice cubes. Everyone was served clear pop and could add colourful ice cubes of their choice. As the ice melted the drinks taste changed. Different combination of ice cubes made for a different drink each time.

Wonderland Garden Games
The first garden game was "Pin the Smile on the Cheshire Cat"
It was "pin the tail on the donkey" with a few exceptions. 1) the participants weren't blindfolded 2) the location of the smile was unknown. Students had their taped smiles all around the room. The correct location was the tip of the cats tail. The girl who chose to give the cat a real smile won for by being closest to the tail. If I played the game again I would either say the location was on the poster or remove both exceptions.

The second game was the Blue Caterpillar Relay Race. The group was divided into two teams. Half the team stood on one side of the room the other half stood across from them on the other side. Each team was given a blue sleeping bag. On "go" the first player had to get into the sleeping bag then inch-worm across the room on their belly. Once he crossed the line the waiting teammate would climb in and return the sleeping bag to the "start". This continued till everyone had inched across the room.

When all the food was eaten and the games played we continued our journey upstairs to Red Queen Court....which will be described in tomorrow's post.

After Thought: this should have been included in yesterdays post: In the main room (where everyone was mingling) I had a youtube playlist project on a screen with all the songs from Disney's 1951 annimated movie including Very Merry Unbirthday and All in a Golden Afternoon: