Need ideas

My wife and I have been given an opportunity by our children's pastor to do the entire service on our own Labor Day weekend. We both think the kids in our group are bored as the services from week to week generally are the same 'ol thing. Typically before service the kids just run around unstructured until 5 minutes before service when the countdown begins and they're supposed to find their seats.
For the service itself we're going to change the order a bit and do some new things but we can't for the life of us figure out what we could do before service. I thought about having beach balls and letting the kids hit them around but we have some boys in the group that we are afraid would injure someone. Our children's church has kids in age from 4 to 12, plus teen workers.
Also the kids don't arrive all at the same time, they tend to filter in over about a 20 minute period.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

I wanted to do beach balls but my wife thought it would be a bad idea with some of our more rambunctious boys. Instead we had a hula hoop contest with 5 kids at a time coming and seeing who could go the longest.

Had a great day, tried a lot of new things that most of the kids really enjoyed. Figured out a few things we would do differently. All in all a great learning experience.

Gary Quest said:

Nothing against women you understand. They all want to organize everything including the free for all. We went from 110 kids down to 40 because the new director (lady) did not want any mishaps so she cut the free for all. Bad idea. Kids are organized all day in school. Whatever happened to sandlot baseball. Kids can't' figure out how to play on their own.

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Some background info. We wanted to do a game for some structure, get the kids excited and yet get some of their energy out. Why? Normally we are just leaders in children's church being mentored in the hopes of one day being childrens pastor. Our childrens church pastor, who is our mentor, was on vacation so we decided to shake things up just a bit because normally there is nothing going on until the countdown other than a movie or video on the big screen.
So what do the kids do? The run around, screaming at each other or trying to play fight. All we do is spend the time trying to keep them from running or hurting each other. Usually it takes time to get the kids in their seats. This week, they all went immediately to their seats, paid attention and had fun. I still would like to do the beach ball thing and the wife will come around but I'll wait until we're full time somewhere or doing a kids krusade.

Of course my wife is a teacher and likes structure and organization so I'm sure down the road we'll have a disagreement about it but she's also willing to try new things to see if they work.

Best idea we had was to use duct tape and outline a huge box in front of the stage, we called it the praise and worship box and had the kids come up there for the songs. Huge hit!