Primary Activity - Missionary Training Center - Issuing the Call

Mission Call Letter (in Microsoft Word)

During the month leading up to the activity we issued "mission calls" to each of the children (we divided them into three groups and gave one group each week).  We asked the bishopric to announce that we were handing them out and encourage the families to open them and go over the packet together.  The packet included their call letter, a My Gospel Standards sheet, and a simple missionary family home evening.

Missionary Family Home Evening (in Acrobat Adobe/pdf)

I have two versions of the My Gospel Standards sheet.  The one I made for our activity has a picture of the new Ogden, Utah temple because that's our closest temple.  For those of you that live in other places, I made one that matches the rest of the clipart I've used this year.  It's a beautiful picture of the Salt Lake City temple made by artist Susan Fitch.

My Gospel Standards - Ogden Temple (in Adobe Acrobat/pdf)

My Gospel Standards - Salt Lake Temple (in Adobe Acrobat/pdf)

To decide which children were going on which mission we had to decide how many groups we wanted to have.  This was partly determined by the size we wanted each group to be, the space we had available in the building and the different languages people in our ward spoke on their missions.  This is where that Mission Survey came in handiest, we looked it over and tried to pick those who had children in primary (to insure greater attendance) and who spoke the language we'd decided we wanted.  Although, we really didn't care which language, as long as it was something other than English.

Next we had to divide the children into an even number of groups. 

And while there may have been an easier way to do this, to divide the groups as evenly as we could, we decided to put together a puzzle.  We printed out a list of all the children in our primary and then cut them apart (we already have our own list, which I talked about on this post).  We sorted them into family groups (usually families come together) and then assigned them into their mission groups in stages.  Stage one was our children and those who faithfully come to every activity, stage two was those whose parents we'd asked to help out at the activity, and stage three was everyone else.  We tried to assign each stage equally across all of our groups and, at the same time, give each group the same number of junior and senior primary children.  It sounds a little complicated, but it went smoothly.

Primary Children Mission Groups (in Microsoft Excel)

The week or two before, we took "mission calls" around to all the children who hadn't made it to church yet (or who don't normally come) along with a short flyer explaining what the call was for.  The adorable clipart in the flyer is from melonheadz illustrating, it's ADORABLE.

Instruction Flyer (in Microsoft Word)

Remember, this one reason I LOVE activities, it gives me a chance to make contact with those families and children I don't get to see all the time.  I feel very strongly it is my job to offer.  I can't do anything more than that, but I can sure as heck do that much.

Just like before, if you click on the link below each picture, you can download an editable version to make planning your activity that much easier!

If you'd like to check out the previous post, I talked about the other things we did to get ready for our FANTASTIC activity.

Next, I'll be talking about our opening activity (I know, four posts in and I'm just getting to the ACTUAL activity).  You know, the one you plan so that when half the kids are late, it doesn't interrupt anything else.  Or, to see any other posts, you can click back to the overview page.

Leah