General Conference Review Game

* This post is about General Conference. We are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (aka Mormons), General Conference is a world-wide conference held twice a year where we listen to talks given by the leaders of our church regarding Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father, raising a family, serving others, etc.
It is for anyone and everyone who would like to listen.
You can find the videos of the speakers at lds.org.

So General Conference wasn't even a week ago and I feel like I have forgotten a majority of the talks and topics already.
That is, the talks I actually got to listen to.
Sitting through 4 sessions of conference with 3 kids at such varying ages means we hear maybe half of what is being said.
We have been able to get our kids to sit and listen to the morning sessions while doing a quiet activity, but even then there is still some talking and distractions going on.

That's kind of how this review game was born.

I realized even if we were getting a chance to watch all of the talks, I myself am not very good at remembering what they were all about.

One night a couple of years ago I didn't have a Family Home Evening prepared. (Family Home Evening is where we get together as a family once a week and take the opportunity to teach our children gospel principles or scripture stories, etc).

We had set conference to record on our DVR and I thought it would be a good idea to start watching it, but only one talk at a time, so we could really try to listen to it.

My eldest son was only 3 at the time, and I knew after a few minutes he might start to zone out.

I wanted him to try and listen to the words, so I decided to make it into a game.

We would each write down some words and if the speaker said your word you got to move a space.

That was it!

To get started I grabbed 4 sheets of regular printer paper and taped them together.

Using a black marker, I then drew a game board.

I didn't measure anything, I just drew the lines in.

 You can use whatever you want as game pieces, for instance you can use something like these little gingerbread men from the board game Candy Land.
Since all of the little men are different colors, you can then use a marker that coordinates with your color and write down your words, just to remind you which one is yours.
To start, each person writes down some 'church' related words. Something you think the speaker will say in their talk.
You can even do different versions of the game where people can or can't use the same word as anyone else.

Turn on the selected conference talk and make sure it's nice and loud so everyone can hear.

We like to put the game board on our coffee table so we are all sitting around it and can reach it when we hear a word.

Throughout the conference talk, if the speaker says a word you've chosen you move your guy one space for each word.

The first person to the 'Finish' square wins.

We have listened to a conference talk and had no one make it to the 'Finish' square, so we will either listen to another talk to finish out the game, or we will see whose piece made it the furthest.

The first time we played this game I was really surprised how much everyone loved it and I loved that everyone was intently listening to the talks. I also love having this idea on hand for those weeks when I haven't prepared anything for Family Home Evening, it's so easy to pull our game board out and pick a talk. It's even better that conference talks from years past are all online on the church's website, and if you feel like there is a specific topic you want your family to listen to you can find a talk on that subject!

I hope you find this just as fun and useful as we did!