Making General Conference More Meaningful

This is an article from Mormon Times section of the Deseret News

Written by Emily W. Jensen

There are some great links for activities for children... and adults... for General Conference.

"Can you feel the buzz in the air? The excitement for the upcoming general conference is becoming almost palpable as members throughout the world prepare their minds and hearts to hear messages from our leaders. Online members similarly start buzzing about general conference weeks in advance, passing links and ideas for making it more meaningful.

I would be remiss to not first send you to the LDS general conference page found at conference.lds.org. You’ll notice that it has activities for children, teachings of the prophets and, if you click the little scroll arrow down below the main photo, you’ll find “My Study Notebook,” an online destination for keeping notes of your favorite messages that you really should discover. (This is my favorite. I especially like the coloring section. Maybe I need to print one off for myself!)

A few years ago, the bloggers at MormonMomma.com got together to compile their favorite ways for “Making General Conference Memorable.” Here are a few of their amazing ideas:

Law of witnesses

“On the Monday before conference we have a family home evening about “a watchman on the tower” and challenge our children that week to do three things:

Pray for those who will be speaking that the Spirit will guide them. Pray that you will have the Spirit and that questions or challenges you have in your life will be addressed. Look for threes. We always look for subjects in threes and talk about how that particular principle must be important enough that it was spoken of three times. We have in the past let our children know that subjects are not assigned to speakers; they are to follow the Spirit when preparing talks for conference, so it is interesting to find three repetitions.

Not-so-trivial pursuit

"I take careful notes during each session of conference and then create questions using my notes. On Sunday afternoons we split up into teams and see who can answer the most questions. The winning team gets a prize. This encourages the kids to take good notes and it gets us all to review what we learned!”

Click in to find many more ideas on how to prepare for, listen to and then apply the lessons learned from general conference.

I personally believe that the blogs are the best place to go for ideas about keeping children in a reverent, receptive mood during conference. Rachel Bruner, of LDS.about.com, continually updates her link list of “General Conference Activities for Children” that includes printable bingo games, notebooks and booklets to keep little ones quiet and content."