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A few months ago, I had the thought that it would be fun to take a night for Personal Progress in which the girls could get a few different value experiences completed or almost done. Then, a couple of months ago, I ran across the idea of doing it like a workshop. It was perfect! Especially because we did it just a couple of weeks before our Young Women In Excellence program.
It’s very simple to organize and I’ll take you through the different steps I took.
First, I went through and found 12 value experiences that would be easy to do this with. I created a form with each of these experiences on it, along with a brief description, and places to sign up. I took the form with me to Relief Society where I made an announcement about what we were doing, a small bit about Personal Progress, and an invitation to sign up to teach one of the workshops. We were lucky and only had a couple of slots that didn’t get filled. I included the sign up sheet that I used in the zip folder that I’m sharing. We really wanted to get the sisters involved, especially because the girls already hear so much from us.
I broke the workshops up into three half hour time slots with four different classes being taught at once. Once I had the times organized, I created another sign up sheet for the Young Women. We passed it around a couple of Sundays so they could sign up for the classes they needed. Each girl could sign up for one class per time slot or three total.
For the teachers, I gave them a description of the value experience that they would be teaching and told them they could do what they would like with it. I had full confidence in our teachers!
The day of, I created signs for the doors of classrooms with what was being taught and what time it was at. These were the signs that I used (I included blank ones in the zip file).
I also ran to the party store and picked up some smiley face balloons and smiley face rings in bulk. The rings were $0.23 a piece and I used them with the goodie bags I had. I also found some little mini pens and notebooks, along with some taffy, to put in the bags from Walmart. Here’s how they looked:
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For a treat afterwards, I made some mini cupcakes and put smiley faces on those with this flag for the cupcake stand. Simple, but still fun, and it all looked cute with the balloons. I split up the balloons and put them in the different rooms.
I also created little cards for each girl with their name, the classes that they signed up for and times, and the rooms they were in. It was easy to do these and really didn’t take much time.
When the girls arrived, I had them check in with me. I gave them their goodie bag and class card. I also had tickets for them and had a poster with how many tickets they could earn that night. I had a fishbowl on the table for them to drop the tickets in throughout the night. And when they signed in, if they brought their personal progress books, they automatically got a ticket!
I kept an eye on the times and reminded teachers of how much time they had left. We didn’t want the night to go long. When it was over, the girls checked out with me and received the remainder of their tickets. I also updated each of their charts with the completed experiences. There were some that didn’t quite finish because it required some follow through. Here’s the breakdown for the tickets:
They wrote their names on the tickets and then we had a little drawing. I had found some candy and other fun little things from Walmart and the Dollar Store. The most popular and wanted items were the two Monsters, Inc. Pez dispensers!
Overall, the night was fun. We received great feedback from the Young Women. They really liked being able to get three experiences done in a night and I think it showed them that Personal Progress isn’t as hard as they think it is! We will definitely be doing this again 🙂 If you’d like the prints that I used, here’s a link to the zip file (it also has the word docs I used for the sign up sheets for Relief Society and YW’s as well as the class cards). If you try this, or anything similar, let me know because I’d love to hear more ideas.
Here is the link for the zipped drive with all of the stuff that I used. I’m sorry if you came by earlier and it wasn’t there. I sometimes get a a little excited and forget things 🙂
