Blog Stalking Has Its Benefits

It means that I can beg, borrow, and steal great ideas from all over the internet.  And that is exactly what I did as I was getting ready for General Conference.  In the past I've printed packets, put together bingo games, all the normal stuff you see to help keep your kids interested and reverent during conference.  At the last General Conference, the packets lasted about twenty minutes and then chaos reigned which meant that when we got to the end of two days of conference, I realized that I had missed pretty much all of it even though I was sitting there in front of the t.v. the entire time.  This time I decided I needed another plan of attack.  I remembered that Tiff has posted links to some ideas of activities for conference, so I hopped on over to her blog and looked them up.

On Monday our family home evening lesson was on General Conference.  I used Elder Uchtdorf's message from this month's Ensign and we talked about how we can prepare for conference and what the benefits of conference are.  Then I told the boys we would have a couple of new (hopefully fun) activities to help us focus on conference and be reverent so we could all listen and learn.  After wondering all week what the activities would be, I unveiled them yesterday.  I used our gospel art kit to put pictures representing different topics up on the wall (including a sheet labeled "Other") and provided pictures of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and a pad of post-it notes to write down names of other speakers.  After each person spoke, their picture or name was taped to the picture representing the topic they spoke about.  Matthew wanted to tape up a picture every now and then which is pretty much the most I expected out of him.  And Daniel was perfectly content just doing his own thing.  But Nathan really loved this activity.  He listened carefully to each speaker, watched to make sure he spelled their name right, and then we discussed what they talked about if he wasn't sure.  He told me he definitely wants to do this again.

I also created some conference buckets, each one with a topic on it (faith, family, scriptures, etc.) and a small treat inside.  Each time they heard the word that was written in the bucket, they got to take two of whatever treat was inside.  If the entire talk was on the topic of a bucket, they got to take five treats.  All the boys liked this one, but again Nathan was the one who listened the best.  Matthew did pretty well for being four, but by the end of conference on Sunday he was pretty much just jumping up when Nathan did and grabbing whatever treat Nathan chose.

But overall I think our experimental activities were a success.  I think we will do it again next time.