General Conference, Pinterest Style

General Conference has always been a challenge for me, even just sitting through both Saturday and Sunday sessions.  I don't think I have EVER watch all 4 sessions, 5 if you want to include the RS broadcast the week before, live, as they were being given.  I have either forgot about Saturday, thinking it was too much, or DVR'd them saying that I will eventually watch them all but never really getting to it.  Well this year was going to be different, and by golly, it was. :o)  I can proudly say that I attended all 5 sessions as they were happening and was able to hear everything.  I am so happy that I did this and even more so, that my children lasted through their 4 sessions fairly well.

Here is a little bit about how we did it.  I will make a few changes for April, but overall I think I am finally finding the key to having the spirit in our home during these wonderful times of instruction and love from our Prophets, Apostles and other leaders.

Pinterest was a huge help this year, I found these General Conference boards that are just amazing and I knew I wanted to take on the task.  Tiff Keetch & Jen Lund have the files on their blog and so generously share them with us.  I am so grateful for their creativity and allowing me to use it.

Here are pictures of my finished product.  I borrowed Tiff Keetch's outline and made a small change or two, but not really. I basically changed colors on a few things and added border/paper behind the clock and the arrows for the music center.

I laminated all my pictures first and then attached them to the board, I did not put contact paper over the whole thing, from experience I have found that contact paper does not stick very well.  The laminated pages did make them heavier and therefore regular scrapbooking double stick tape was not strong enough, I ended buying Command foam tape and it worked much better.

The one difficult thing I found about this was that Aamerik is too young and would want to mess with it constantly.  We had to keep it out of his reach which kinda put it "outta sight, outta mind" for the other kids, but Jairyn and Aaliyah both would got to the board to update it.  As Aamerik gets older I think this will be a huge hit...we will still continue to use it.  I even found myself wanting to go and place the topics for the speakers.  Funny how silly we can get and excited over something we have made for our kids...honestly I think I really did make it just for me. :o)

The next idea I put into effect came from little-inspirations.blogspot, I also found this on Pinterest. We had key words with candy associated to them, when ever the kids heard that word (in an actual talk) then they could take a piece of candy from that dish.  I added on to this to teach a little bit of patience.  I told them that if they had most of their candy by the end, they could get a bigger prize.  I would let them eat a piece or two, but to save most of it.  The bigger prize was going to be a king size candy bar, but I nixed that idea and found something for each of them that cost under $3. But they of course had no idea what the prize was.  They wondered excitedly about it and even tried to guess, some of the guesses were a larger candy bar, ice cream and even getting to stay home from school one day.  That was Jairyn's hope, lol. 

This of course was a huge hit...it had candy involved...but again Aamerik just wanted to sit on the table and get into it.  Another hurdle to jump over, I had the candy sitting on the dining table with all the chairs pulled away so Aamerik wouldn't be able to climb up on them to get into the candy.  Of course the dining table is not facing the TV and the younger kids wanted to gather around it.  The candy for Family, Jesus and Love were gone pretty quickly, I even refilled them. Even tho the kids weren't facing the TV, their ears were open and they were listening. By the end of the 1st session on Saturday I knew I needed to make a change.

So here is the change I made...the idea came from Teighlor, yes even the almost 19yr old was getting in on the candy action!!  ha ha  I took away the candy bowls except for 3 words that were not used as much...I chose "obey, repentance, & commandments".  Then I took all the other words and made a tally sheet.  Between Saturday and Sunday the kids used the tally system whenever they heard their words.  I had to decide what amount gave them the larger prize.  I decided that anyone that got over 150 between their candy and tally would win.  They all made it. :o)  They were excited and seem to have fun.  Teighlor came in with the most, I think she was over 300 and Jairyn was next with over 200.  Even Tariyah who was 5 was in on the game and listened for her words, I did help her a bit at first, when I heard the word I would excitedly ask her if she heard that, she would tell me the word she heard and go for the candy.  This is something we will definitely do again, I may change the words up so they have to listen for different things.  For the gifts, Teighlor got some nail polish as she has been into "spa" days with her little sisters, Taiason got a Hunger Games bracelet I found on clearance and the others got a little collector toy kinda like a squinky.  Nothin' big, just fun.  

 I am really happy at how General Conference went in our home, there were still times the kids were getting restless but for the most part they were awesome.  Next time I am going to add some activity baskets.  I think I will have a different activity for them to do during each session, so that means 4 baskets.  I am not sure what I will do for all of them, but for one I will have foam stickers and cut outs. In October we are coming up on Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas...so I will have them decorate some of these things and use them in the house decor.  In April we are usually right around Easter so that will be my focus then. :o)