General Conference

Now that our son Hunter is old almost 3 years old, we decided that we needed to do something to help him participate in General Conference. I found great General Conference activity packet here. Most of the packet is geared for older kids, but we printed off the first few pages so that he could color in the ties of the General Authorities as they spoke. There is also a good General Conference activity packet for older kids here. I also printed off coloring pages from the Friend that I found on this site. I also created a tally sheet of key words that I wanted him to listen for. The list included: Jesus Christ, Scriptures, Prayer, Baptism, Temple, Obedience, Family, Prophet, Missionary, Commandments, Holy Ghost, Priesthood, Testimony, Love, God, and Faith. Each time he heard a word (or we told him that we heard it), he put a tally mark next to it and got a snack. I had fruit snacks, pretzels, crackers, and cheese cubes for him to snack on. Having not done this kind of thing before I didn't realize how often these key words were mentioned. About half way through the Saturday morning session he'd had all the snacks he wanted and ended up with almost 200 tallies after only 1 session. So, for next year, we'll probably have a shorter list of words.

This all worked quite well at keeping him focused. We also did a couple other things that probably helped too. We picked up the house so that there were no toys out to distract him. And we ran around like crazy during the hymns to burn off energy and help him sit still better during the talks. All in all, I think it was a success. We were able to keep his attention on conference for the full 2 hours. I don't know if we'll be able to repeat the success tomorrow, but we'll try.