Family home evening is a great chance to help prepare your children for General Conference. This week I am going to include a few ideas that can help your children to become excited about conference. It is important that you talk to your children about what they can gain by listening to the leaders of the church and applying the counsel to our lives.
Opening and closing with a prayer always sets the right tone for family home evening. Singing is another great way to do this. Two songs that would help with this lesson are “We Thank Thee, Oh God, for a Prophet” Hymnbook p 22, and “Follow the Prophet” Children’s Songbook p 110-111.
One idea that helps young people to pay attention to conference is to teach the children about the leaders of the church. For very young children you might just focus on the First Presidency of the church. You can show them their pictures and tell each of them a little bit about their lives. You can find a lot of this information in old issues of the Friend or on the church’s web site under the section Gospel Library.
For the older children, you can cover all of the apostles and the First Presidency. You could assign each of your children one or two people to do research on and then have each of them teach a little of the lesson tonight. Or you could have a matching game in which you match the stories to the person to make it a little fun. Make sure that you use pictures, because this will help your children remember and recognize the apostles.
You might also want to prepare Conference bingo cards during family home evening, if your family plays conference bingo. If you have your children take notes then you might hand out special notebooks, and discuss different ways of taking notes during conference. Make sure your children remember to include things like the date, and who is speaking. It is also a good idea to do a short summary of a sentence or two at the end of the talk.
Of course you should end your family home evening with refreshments.
What are some ways that you help to prepare your children for General Conference?