(This post is for my followers who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. But if you’re curious about what “general conference” is, you can find out more here.)
I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for General Conference activities to make the weekend more meaningful and exciting for my children. Last conference, we came up with an idea for during conference that actually had them listening and my oldest (7yrs old) taking notes.
But as I was looking around on lds.org last night I stumbled across a resource that I thought I would use as a countdown. Here’s how it will work:
- Start 15 days before general conference.
- Each day, listen to one of the short “special witness” videos on lds.org of one of the apostles giving their testimony. We’re going to do this as our family scripture study each day.
- Print out a picture of each of the apostles and the prophet. When you watch a video, put that apostle’s picture (label the names if you want) up on a wall where they will stay through General Conference and the kids can see them frequently and start to recognize them. It will be fun when they see them speaking and can recognize the face as being one on the wall.
- We started with the newest apostle and worked our way up to the prophet the night before conference. Then you have all the pictures on the wall for conference weekend.
3/5/18
We’ve now done this for a couple years and my kids still look forward to it every time conference comes around. I love how it gets us prepared and ready for conference leading up to it. I love the way the kids come to recognize the apostles. And I love the way it gives us something new to do during family scripture time and being able to emphasize to the kids that words from our current prophets and apostles are considered to be scripture too.
As for what to do on the actual conference weekend, there are tons of great ideas out there & we’ve tried a lot of them. Instead of doing candy rewards during conference, we changed things up last conference and I was really excited by how it went, giving my kids some different ways of taking notes that kept them engaged, listening, and enjoying our conference weekend together. Find out what we did, in this post: General Conference: 9 Fun Note Taking Ideas for Kids
I’m Loving this idea! I think it’s great for 2 specific reasons, and am sure that there are more positives that can come from doing it…
1- It will help us all to listen to and remember the talks the apostles/prophets give (because we seem to pay attention to and remember things when those people we know more about talk about something). And, also when they hear quotes at church, etc. from them.
– We could include the auxiliary presidencies of the organizations to which we belong in our house: Primary, Young Women and Relief Society!
2- When changes happen, it may be a little less confusing knowing who-is-who and can lead into an easy discussion of these transitions!
Thanks for sharing this post!
Great idea to include the presidencies from the auxiliaries. It would definitely take longer, but I know I always struggle to remember who is in each presidency so it would help me as well to have their pictures on the wall.