Free Young Women Theme Printable

At the beginning of the year we decided to decorate our YW Room. I made this theme and displayed it in our room. It's now what we use every Sunday to recite our theme. 

Feel free to save the picture, print it out, and use it in your room. 

It was created as a 12x18 photo. I just sent it to Costco to have printed, but it could be printed at any print place. 

Young Women Value Banner

We had an amazing girls camp this year! It was planned by the stake and the theme was "Get A Clue". The amazing stake leaders came up with a whole idea that turned out to be awesome! I only went up for the big dinner and testimony meeting since I had a baby a few months ago.
However, I did create a lot of decorations for it that I am happy to share. Our ward was given the player of Mrs. Peacock to use as inspiration. We came up with the theme "Show Your True Colors". We used purple and teal to coordinate everything together.

I made a few things, but don't have the pictures from it yet. I will post them when I do. I did make a value banner that we displayed at camp and then plan on displaying in our YW room.

If you'd like the file, just comment with your email and I will send you the PDF file. I am still learning how to make a PDF file (or google docs) available on my blog.

I just printed them on cardstock and then laminated them.

Why is it important for me to get an education?

The curriculum in "Come Follow Me" this month is all about "Spiritual & Temporal Self-Reliance." I am teaching the whole group of young women this week (my first time ) and decided to do the lesson on education.
I have decided to follow the lesson outline on lds.org almost to a T. HERE is the lesson link.  There are a lot of good things in it. I liked it because there are some group work things in there. Since I will have a large group, I plan on dividing them up and making sure they participate! :)

The lesson ideas that stuck out to me and I chose to teach are:

Intro:
Invite the young women to imagine that a friend from church tells them she is going to drop out of school, explaining, “I’m going to get married someday, and my husband will support me, so I don’t need to keep going to school.” How would the young women encourage her to continue to pursue an education? Ask them to write their responses on a piece of paper. Collect the papers, and read and discuss the responses with the class. At the end of class, give them the opportunity to add to their responses based on what they learned during the lesson.

I chose this one because it's something that will happen in every day life. The young women are at a time in their life where they will hear their fellow classmates talking like this.

Next, a few ladies that have pursued their education are coming to come are class to talk about how their education has blessed their lives. I told them to talk for about 3-5 minutes each.

Next, I'm going to divide the class into five different groups to complete this: Assign the young women to read individually one of the five paragraphs from the “Education” section of For the Strength of Youth or the statements by President Gordon B. Hinckley and President Thomas S. Monson at the beginning of the talk “Seek Learning: You Have a Work to Do.” Ask them to explain to the class what they read, and discuss why it is important to work diligently now to gain a good education. Invite the young women to think about and share their goals to gain an education.

Time permitting I will also have them complete this: Divide the class into three groups. Ask the first group to read Proverbs 31:10–31, ask the second group to read the scriptures in this outline that teach that we should seek wisdom and knowledge, and ask the third group to read the scriptures in this outline that give examples of people who sought knowledge. Ask each group to discuss what their assigned scriptures teach them about the importance of pursuing education and developing skills. Invite each group to share with the rest of the class what they discussed. How will gaining an education help the young women in their lives? How will it help them become better wives and mothers?

The scripture references are included on the lds.org lesson plan I linked to above.

Finally, I will share my personal testimony on education, focusing on how much they will learn about themselves.. I will also encourage the young women to seek education in their own ways. College, travel, reading, etc. are all great ideas to gain education.
They will then complete their goals using the sheet I created here:

Feel free to print and share. Just right click the image and save it.

I LOVE the handout that is posted on All Things Bright and Beautiful HERE. It ties perfectly with my lesson. I love the bookmark idea too! So cute.

Random Acts of Kindness

I was in charge of the combined young women activity this month. Since the theme of this month is to be more Christ like, we decided to do something that can help us become more Christ like. We followed a theme of Random Acts of Kindness.

The activity:
We divided into groups that split up and went to various parts of our neighborhood/ward. I had a few things ready for the girls to just take to people. Each group grabbed a few things.
The assignments and/or stuff I gave ideas to do were:

• take bubbles to the park and either give them to kids playing or leave them for the bubbles to be found later.
• deliver homemade cookies to different people
• pass out root beer with the saying "we are rooting for you" to any they know that might be competing in something. Or someone that might just need a root beer :)
• Wave and say hi to everyone they see.
• Write chalk messages on the sidewalk
• bring garbage cans up to people's houses (this worked out nice since today was garbage day)
• pick garbage up if they saw it
• write anything to make them happy
• anything they felt inspired to do

The only rules were that every girl had to do at least one thing.
These were some of the handouts I did...

Afterwards we went back to the church. We put our chairs into a circle and had the girls tell me what they did and how it made them feel.  It was really cool to see who they delivered stuff too. Most of it was just to some random strangers. I was so impressed. One girl had the idea to bring bubbles to a house with a bike and knock on the door and run. So many people left chalk messages, a group of girls pulled garbage cans up. The stories were so neat to hear!

Then we played a game with some yarn. I started and threw the yarn to someone. When I threw it to them I had to tell them when thing I admired about them. They wrapped the yarn around their wrist and threw it to someone else and did the same thing. At the end, the whole circle was a big web. Everyone had something nice said about them, and everyone was able to complete a last random act of kindness. I mentioned that even though we are all different we can all have something nice to say to one another. Let's be more Christ like and look for the good in others, not the bad. Our YW president also gave a great message. She said that everyone
is good at something. If we look to the person sitting next to us we can find something they are better at than us. It was fun to see the girls all in a circle and talking nice to one another.

I gave them this handout and then had rice krispie treat balls as snacks.

Black Light Party

Our beehive group was in charge of the combined young men/young women activity. The girls have been dying to do a glow in the dark party. With Halloween here, we thought this would be a great idea!

You can purchase a customized invite on my Etsy shop here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/174122724/glow-in-the-dark-party-customizable?ref=shop_home_active

We didn't do much set up to keep it simple. We made a few poster boards with some neon paint. We also had three big black lights and 1 strobe light.

We started out with a devotional on the talk made my Elder Uchtdorf called " Tge Hope of God's Light. We did this devotional with the lights dimmed and the black lights on.

With the devotional we served the refreshments. It's always hard to gather everyone up towards the end. We served sherbert ice cream and then poured some sprite over it. We Put a glow stick underneath the cup to make the cups glow. They were all different colors so it looked cool.

After the devotional we played some games. The color of the glow stick they had determined the team they were on. We thought about glow in the dark volleyball, but then changed our mind to do some team building activities. We divided them into five different groups and then played these games:

Human Knot: They put their hands in a circle and hand to untangle the knot. This was fun because it was in the dark.

Rock Paper Scissors Dragon: Our ward always has a tournament during it's ward campout. I thought this game would be fun to do, but just adding on something a little different. In their groups they found someone to play rock paper scissors with. If they lost the round, the grabbed onto the shoulders of the winner. That group played another group and the losers would then add on to them. Finally, they have to play all the other teams until the champion is at the front of the chain.

Tape Ball: I didn't use tape on this. What I did was wrapped up some candy and glow bracelets and other knick knacks I had laying around. I used cling wrap and wrapped it into a ball. I made sure to have some spots full of cling wrap. Their were 2 people rolling dice in each team. When someone got to doubles they could have a turn unwrapping the candy.

 

 

 

Ooga Booga: For this game we divided the big group into two big circles. They held hands and then looked down and called out "ooga booga, ooga booga, and then looked up and said "ooh" When they looked up they had to look at someone in the eyes. If that person was looking back then they were both out. It was fun because when people started to get out, they started doing games of their own.

We also had a girl who does photography in our ward volunteer to take some cool pictures. She found a dark place and had the kids make different shapes with the glow
sticks. There were some cute ones!

We had the kids and leaders say this was an awesome activity. We definitely had a lot of fun!

Young Women General Conference Handout

Since General Conference is coming up, I was searching the internet for a cute handout/idea to give to the my young women for General Conference. I was planning on making my own until I came across this handout. Isn't it so cute? You can find it HERE. Courtney has A LOT of cute ideas. I'm sure you can find other cute stuff you'd want to use as well.

Why We Keep the Sabbath Day Holy

I got to teach my beehives this week on why we keep the Sabbath day holy. I used the format of the lesson found HERE. I also like to use object lessons whenever I can. I feel that they engage the girls and help them remember things. I was searching and searching and found some good ideas. They were all messy, required lots of prep on my time, or just didn't seem to fit right. Until... I came across THIS lesson.
It focuses on how our minds and bodies need rest, so does our spirituality. We can focus and prepare for the week better when we have "fed" and "rested" our spirits by keeping the Sabbath day holy.

Here is a handout I made to go along with it. I had the girls fill out the activities they will do on the Sabbath day.

 Feel free to print and share!

You can either print it double sided.. or just print one of each and then cut and glue/tape them to each other.

Young Women Values

I was recently called to serve in the young women organization in my church. In the LDS church, we "strive to live values". I decided to create this handout to give to the new young women entering in, along with the other items they will be give (personal progress etc.). I wanted to add the meaning of the young women values to the girls because they probably have no idea what most of them mean. Giving them a brief meaning will allow them to know what they are striving to be like.
I printed these and attached them to some skittles (the big bag) since the skittles have all the colors except for white and gold.
Feel free to print and share!