Pin the Tongue on the Donkey
This game was an absolutely blast to make and play. This particular Sunday we were teaching on one of the often overlooked stories in the bible, the story of Balaam and the talking donkey. Since we like each part of the class to contribute to the overall theme (even the games, songs, etc), we came up with a somewhat unique twist on “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”. We instead went with “Pin the Tongue on the Donkey” in honor of Balaam and his crazy animal. It was great fun!
Since we wanted it to be as big as possible, we went with a full piece of 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood which luckily we were able to salvage from a muddy pile in the back of our church. It was 1/2″ thick and if we had purchased it from Home Depot or its equivalent it would have cost anywhere from $10 up to $25 depending on the quality. Cardboard would work as well but wouldn’t be as durable. We would like reuse this both later in class and at our yearly HarvestFest so it was worth it to us to make it more sturdy than was absolutely necessary.
I downloaded a piece of donkey clipart that I was happy with from a random Google image search after sorting through many hundreds of them. I then used a laptop and a projector to shoot the image onto the piece of plywood although you can just as well use an overhead projector or even freehand it (not a good idea for me). We used a pencil to trace out the shape of the donkey along with any key features such as the eye, nostril and anything else that would be difficult to locate later. We completely avoided tracing the mouth however as this part would not be painted.
Once everything was traced out, the hardest part of the project began which really wasn’t too bad. This was the cutting out of the donkey with a jigsaw. That finished, we lightly sanded to get ready for painting. At this point I was sure exactly what to do. I knew that the first coat of paint would eliminate all of the pencil marks I had so carefully made so I used a razor blade and cut the wood as deep as I could on all of the lines I cared about. This allowed me to still see the lines even when covered with paint. Luckily this worked really well.
We painted it as close to the original picture as possible, using a big paintbrush (roller would have been easier but I didn’t have one handy) for the big areas, a small brush for the details such as eye and nose and finally, spray paint for the shading. It came out pretty neat!
Following this we had to figure out how to stand it up so we once again scavenged around the back of the church and came up with a 4″ x 4″ post and some old wooden stakes. We cut the post down and made a stand about 3 1/2′ feet tall using the stake as braces for the bottom of the post. We then roughly found the balancing point of the donkey, drilled an over-sized hole at that point and used a stout wood screw to secure it to the post while still allowing it to swing.
The final part seemed relatively simple but turned out to be really annoying because I couldn’t find a mouth I liked. I finally had to find one that was close and grotesquely elongate it. The lips looked kind of weird, so we ended up cutting those off later as you can see on the right.
We printed out 5 of the tongues and then put mounting putty on the back of them. We were NOW READY TO PLAY!!!!!
The same rules applied to this game as they do to pin the tail of the donkey with, of course, the target being a somewhat different end of the animal.
We used a blindfold, spun the kids around, aimed them roughly at the donkey and let them go. We found that because the donkey was cut out, that they could use their other hand to figure out where the mouth should go. We finally made them put the other hand behind their back. For the older kids we rocked the donkey vigorously which made it quite a bit more difficult.
IT WAS A BLAST!
