Ward Activity!

Tonight I helped throw a ward activity, and just to bore you all I thought I'd tell you all about it. I'm in the Primary Presidency and in charge of the quarterly activities. I don't know about you, but to my mind there are already WAAAAY too many church activities going on most of the time, so I came up with the clever idea to combine our quarterly activity with a ward activity, which saves everyone a Saturday morning.

Our theme was "Family Home Evening." The activity started in half the gym, where we had everyone bring blankets and sit on them for a picnic feel. Between rows of blankets we taped long pieces of newsprint, with markers, for the kids to draw on. First, a member of the bishopric spoke and shared his testimony for just a few minutes. Then we had had a 25-30 minute panel of people from all stages of life (young families, mixed ages, singles, empty nesters, part member families, etc.) talk about their family home evening and field questions from the audience. We wanted to have a mock FHE by a family in the ward, but seeing how this past week was Spring Break, that didn't work out.

After the panel, we broke up into FHE activities that families could wander to as desired. Our ward always talks about how much they just want to mingle and talk at activities, so we let the rest of the evening be casual so they could chat and hang around as desired. (This was my part of the activity.)

I set up four rooms:

1) FHE treat cooking demonstrations by the Achievement Day girls. Soooooooo cute! We held it in the nursery and there wasn't nearly enough room because everyone wanted to come watch! The girls glowed with culinary success and fame.

2) Two YW led FHE games activities in the RS room. They helped me with this activity and will again with the next one to fulfill one of their YW projects. The favorite game was Primary Song Charades and the little bit I saw was riotously funny.

3) FHE craft making assignment charts out of Chinet paper plates. Plates, markers, scissors, and brads, the easiest craft ever and I was amazed how popular this one turned out. The room was packed and we actually had to ask people to go do something else for a while at one point. The YSAs turned theirs into real works of art, truly impressive what they could create with crayola markers and paper plates!

4) Musical Chairs. Why? Because I do musical chairs at every Primary activity and it's always a hit. I love musical chairs. I think I played it every one of my birthday parties until, um, I left home for college and didn't have any chairs to play it on anymore. ha ha.

Finger foods were brought by the families and left on tables in the gym for people to munch on as desired. Just napkins, no utensils. Water and lemonade for drinks. Very simple, which was our goal for most of the activity. Huge kudos to Brandy, our ward activity leader, who spearheaded the whole shebang. We had a marvelous turn out, I thought, and all the families seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Another activity done, and seems to be a success!