General Conference

So, last weekend was General Conference.  Conference weekend is a time to be uplifted, strengthened, inspired... and driven crazy by your kids.  Granted, it's a lot of time for them to be quiet and relatively still.  So this time I wanted to be prepared with some fun activities for them to do during the conference sessions.

Now, when we were in Death Valley we didn't get conference on TV. So we would download it and listen to the talks on our way to and from church for the next several weeks (church was over an hour away, so it didn't take that long).  Last fall was our first effort at a true conference weekend, and since we were at Patrick's mom's house (aka spoiling grandma), we were not successful in fulfilling our vision of how we want conference weekend to be.  Hey, I don't think we will ever really "get there", but this time I wanted to get a little closer.

So here's what we did:
I googled "General Conference activities" and came up with THIS lovely website full of them.  I chose conference bingo, conference marker dot pages, and I made binders for each girl using activity pages from the Friend magazine.  I simply tore out the activity page, glued one on each side of a plain white piece of copy paper, and inserted into a clear page protector.  We had A LOT of old friend magazines lying around, so we made a good size activity binder for each of them.  I bought some dry erase crayons and voila! They were able to color and do the activities, then erase them and do them again.  I plan to use these binders for sacrament meeting too, swapping out activities as we get new magazines.  The last thing we did, which I saved for the last session, for something new, was to make a General Conference collage.  Remember all those Friend magazines I tore pages out of? I let the kids have at what was left of them for their collage.  Anything they heard about in conference (anything church related, really) they could cut out and glue onto a poster board.  They actually didn't finish it during the session, so we will continue to work on it after church until it's done (hopefully it takes a while!). 

Our Conference weekend still was not perfect.  I did not have perfectly quiet, perfectly still children.  But I think that through doing Conference related activities, the girls were able to understand that Conference weekend is special.  Hopefully they will continue to appreciate just how special it is as they grow!

How was your conference?