Quick Overview:
Contestants plunge their foot into a bowl of Jello to try and retrieve little plastic animal figurines using just their toes. The first player to find and remove the designated animal from the bowl wins!
Supplies You’ll Need:
1. Bowls. We used disposable plastic bows from the grocery store, but really you can use any type of bowl. The smaller the bowl the less entertaining the game, people want to see deep Jello submerssion.
2. Jello. You can do this one of two ways: either make Jello the old fashioned way with the animals already embedded, or just buy individual Jello cups and mash them up with the animals. Since I’m not much of a cook, I went with the latter.
3. Small Animal Figurines. Is figurines the right word? Probably not. But who cares. Just go to the dollar store and buy some small plastic/rubber animal toys. Make sure you buy a variety of animals and duplicates of each animal so each contestant can be searching for the same one.
4. Towels and Cleaning Supplies. The last thing you want is smelly, jello covered, feet of middle schoolers trampling around your room. Make sure they clean those puppies off before running away.
Prep:
It depends on how you prepare your Jello. You’ll either have to make Jello the old fashioned way, or you’ll need to be emptying Jello cups into bowls. We felt like for hygiene purposes we needed to use a different bowl/Jello set for each student (I’m not trying to spread warts or fungas at youth group). So that means you’ll need to have all of your bowls prepared ahead of time.
Game Play:
We played with 2 students going to head to head. Each bowl had about 8 different animals in it, and we called out one of them and the students raced to fish them out. One important rule was the player actually had to lift the animal out of the Jello gripping it with their toes – no kicking it out or pushing it over the side. Because this is such a quick game, we played best of 3 rounds to determine a winner.
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