Measure of Our Creation (Stake Relief Society Conference)

This activity was based off of talk by Patricia T. Holland in a speech she gave at BYU. You can read the full speech HERE

Our stake Relief Society president opened up by saying a few words from the talk and bearing her testimony. The rest of the time was fulfilled by a musical group from Houston, TX, called Houston's Artistic Celebrations of Life. As far as I know they don't have a website or social media page. I don't even have the name of the sister who was in charge of the group as all of the communication was handled by our stake RS president. The group gathered together singers and dancers and musical numbers written by LDS composers, and they had a program put together (I don't have a copy of the program) that expressed ideas they found from this speech by Sister Holland. I think you could easily recreate a similar program by recruiting someone in your stake who is musically-inclined. They had young and old women, women of different races, single women, married women. It was really a celebration of women! They didn't charge us to come and perform but we did put together a breakfast for them on Saturday morning as well as find members in the stake who would be able to host the large group in their homes on Friday evening.

Afterwards, a luncheon was served. We asked the sisters to bring canned or boxed food as well as some other items a local charity group in the community needed, and we donated that to them.

I created the invitations and posters (in Spanish & English) as seen below.

English invitation (front & back)

English Poster

Spanish Invitation (front & back)

Spanish Poster

My favorite part about the event was that the music wasn't just all spiritual. There were some numbers in there that were fun and interactive with the audience. But there was a spiritual element to it as well which is always perfect. Hope you get some ideas!

We Are Sisters - Lesson on Unity

This year our talk in the Ward Conferences is about finding unity. We decided not to worry about a PowerPoint presentation this year so we just did posters instead with a scriptures and quotes. Most of our questions were based on the quotes. Additionally, I wanted to keep the handouts simple as well so I designed a 5x7" quote that I printed at Walgreens (it's in English and Spanish).


HANDOUTS

POSTERS

Relief Society Invitations for General Conference, Stake RS Temple Days, and Misc.

I design a lot of the invitations for our activities as well so I thought I'd include images for you to use as ideas. If you'd like me to modify a design I've done or create a new design for you, please email me for requests. You can also see my other work on Etsy under Inspired by the Muse

GENERAL WOMEN'S BROADCASTS

STAKE RELIEF SOCIETY TEMPLE DAYS

MISC

Forgive and Live! (Ward Conference Lessons)

This is the lesson we gave during the ward conferences. Our president related a story from Bishop H. Burke Peterson's talk in General Conference called, "Removing the Poison of an Unforgiving Spirit". It's about a group of YSA that go hiking in the mountains of Las Vegas, and one of the girls gets bitten by a poisonous snake. Instead of rushing her to the hospital, they waste time tracking down and killing the snake. By the time she gets to the hospital, her leg is beyond saving and they have to amputate it. Below are some example pictures of the slides. For the snake story, if you'd like to use different pictures or if you need to print out pictures other than the ones I made, I'd suggest www.pixabay.com  They have free pictures and graphics you can use. Or check out stock free photos using a Google search.

I originally had a copy of the full lesson plan we used but I'm unable to find a copy anymore, and it's been over a year that this lesson was given as I'm updating this. However, with the new program of teaching and the direction we're supposed to be taking with our teaching, I encourage you to prayerfully consider the words Heavenly Father would have to teach to your family or Relief Society sisters or whomever you're preparing this lesson for. There are several talks from General Conference and books available on the subject of forgiveness. I was able to include the 6 major discussion points we used (see below) so maybe that will help you create a general outline for your lesson/talk. 

I made cards for all the sisters in our stake by printing the images below on regular sized card stock in different colors. Send me an email if you'd like a copy sent to you (it's available in English and Spanish). It has a quote on the front with questions on the inside. We purposely didn't do the questions during the lesson. We handed them out at the end, and encouraged them to think about the lesson and fill out the card at home or during their personal studies.

I bought reflective mirror-like paper on Amazon HERE and then cut them to fit the mirror on the inside of the card. I used a craft glue to adhere them to the paper. I found it was easier to print everything, glue the mirrors, cut the paper in half, and then fold in half. (You don't even have to fold them in half if you don't want to. I have a scoring board that is useful for making cards so it didn't take much time at all.) It sounds like a lot but since we weren't doing all of the ward conferences at once, I only needed to worry about 30 cards at a time. Make sure you print front and back 

FRONT (English)

INSIDE (English)

FRONT (Spanish)

INSIDE (Spanish)

The most frustrating part of all this was trying to get the internet to work in the Church buildings. I had my own projector that I got off Amazon that was affordable. I wanted to make sure we had one in case the building we were going to be in didn't have one. I also used Google Slides to create the presentation instead of PowerPoint because Google Slides is free and accessible from any device when I can log into my Google account (they also free versions of Word and Excel). I have a Chromecast so ideally I could connect the Chromecast to the projector, pull up the presentation on my phone, cast to the Chromecast, and then it'd show up on the projector. I had to do it this way because no one in our presidency or myself owns a laptop. If so, you can connect it to one of the TV's from the library. The building the YSA meet in already has a projector installed in the main room because it doubles as the institute building. Thankfully, we had the posters as back up. You can order those from Walgreens or Wal-Mart, etc.

We received a lot of positive feedback from the sisters who wanted extra cards for the sisters that were on their visiting teaching route or they wanted copies of the slides so they could study it on their own. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!

Angels Among Us

Wow! It's been a LONG time since I posted! I won't fill you in on my life since I know you're not here for my life story. The only thing you need to know is I am now in a family ward and the stake Relief Society secretary. I absolutely love it! I wanted to share with you some elements of a lesson our presidency gave at our stake auxiliary training meeting a few months ago.

The theme was Angels Among Us. Our president had asked me if I could sing a solo or put a group together to sing for our lessons to all the stake RS presidencies (we have 9 wards so roughly it was 27 women). A few years ago I sang in a trio in East Texas and I absolutely loved the song! It's called "Will You Be My Angel?" and the sheet music is free online. You can get it HERE. It's for a soprano, tenor and alto with a piano accompaniment. The story of the song is a sister (soprano) who is lonely and needs comfort so she prays to Heavenly Father to send an angel. The voice of Heavenly Father (tenor) reaches out to another sister to ask her to reach out to the first sister, to be His angel. The 2nd sister (alto) replies that she is willing to do whatever God asks of her because she has felt His goodness and comfort during her own life. At the end, they all 3 come together to sing. The song is so gorgeous and I loved singing it. The message is so sweet.  We decided this would be a good message for our lesson. I sent out the invitations about a month in advance. I have to do everything in Spanish and English.

We sang our song at the beginning of the meeting so it set the mood for the rest of the meeting.

Oftentimes when we think of angels we imagine heavenly beings who are watching over us but Elder Holland gave a talk in General Conference called "The Ministry of Angels", and he tells us how we can be angels to the people around us. The main quote we focused on says, "Not all angels are from the other side of the veil. Some of them we walk with and talk with here, now, every day." Our president some to the presidencies about how they could be angels to their sisters and how to encourage them those sisters to help each other.

After she spoke, we had 3 RS presidents give a 5-10 minute lesson on fellowship, teaching with the Spirit, and service. We addressed some other stake items with the remaining time, and then ended with a brunch. Our dessert was an angel food cake with Cool Whip and strawberries along with some other light finger foods.

For a gift/handout, our president picked up several spiral notebooks at the store since they were very inexpensive due to school sales going on. I created a collage of picture quotes that had to do with angels or service which I printed on cardstock paper. I used a spray adhesive to attach to them to the front of the notebooks. We put one in each chair before the meeting so they had one to use during the meeting to take notes if they wanted. I also created 3-4 notebooks with Spanish quotes (which are much harder to find) for our Spanish-speaking sisters. I basically found a quote and then designed it in picture quote form to use as part of the collage. If you're interested in having a copy of the Spanish file, please email me at: themusegirl@gmail.com. For English quotes, you can find lots of images on Pinterest and use a picture editing program to set them up into a collage. Since those are not my images, I don't want to give them out. But I uploaded some pictures below as a reference.

Spanish cover (the image/quote in the top left hand corner isn't mine):

English cover:

Hope you found something helpful! We had a very spiritual meeting and I think the sisters felt encouraged to go forth to love and serve their sisters!

Single Girl Survivor

This one is pretty easy. I always try to think of things that would be useful to the women in a YSA ward. We especially ave a lot of younger girls who have graduated from high school in the past 1-2 years so most of them still live at home, and their parents are doing these things for them. While I'm not the stereotypical feminist, I believe that women should prepare themselves at all times. I know in the past 5 years I've had to learn some things about being on my own that I didn't really learn living at home. As you can see from the flyer above, these are things I've had to teach myself or had someone teach me (with the exception of the sewing since I've been playing with a needle and thread even when I was a little girl but basic sewing skills are good for anyone.) In my late 20's, the thought occurs to me often that if I never get married, I'm going to have to do a lot of stuff on my own. And these skills are useful even for married women or women preparing to serve a mission as well but since I'm in a YSA ward, we're always thinking about the next step of our lives. Marriage is the next step and ultimately a temple marriage is an end goal for everyone. It is to help us prepare for eternal life.

When I asked people to teach the classes, I gave them a general idea of what I was looking for, suggestions on the direction they could go, and left it up to them to make their own lesson plan. We provided dinner which were dishes made from basic pantry items since YSA usually don't have a full-blown food storage.

My original idea would have worked if we had had more people show up but we only had a handful of people. My original idea was to have different stations the girls could rotate around. I wasn't going to tell them they had to visit every station if they didn't want to. If they wanted to spend half their time learning about money and the other half about cooking, then they could do that. The point of the activity is to teach them something they might not already know how to do. Honestly, 15 minutes per station isn't really enough to teach them a lot but they at least get a taste of it and get their feet wet. They might even discover a new talent or interest they didn't know they had.

As it was, we had a small group so we had the sewing class first, then the car activity, and because the first two took up so much time, we didn't have time to learn about cooking or money management. I was in charge of the cooking class and had a fun and easy dessert prepared that they could make there so they learned a fun recipe :) Going forward, I will find another opportunity to incorporate those basics into future activities because I still believe these are useful skills, and it's fun learning how to do them.

Here are some pictures and overview of what was taught in case you need some ideas on lesson plans:

For the sewing portion, the teacher brought small samples of fabric for us to use. She taught us how to hem, how to sew a seam, and how to sew on a button. I was surprised how many people didn't know how to do this so I'm definitely going to try to have sewing incorporated into more activities even if it's a side activity. I'm not a whiz by any means but I know how to do basic stuff.

Here, the guys taught us how to change the tire on a car (that's my little blue car in the last picture :D). They pointed out where some of the basic things are under the hood like where all your fluids are like oil, transmission, steering, etc. They showed us how to jump your car, and one of the guys showed us basic things he keeps in his car in case he needs them like a toolbox, jumper cables, jacks, a blanket, etc. It was fun having the guys there, and their tips were really helpful!!!

This is the dessert I did which I learned on my mission from my mission president's wife. It's called Cake in a Mug (or in this case, Mug in a Cup). I'm sure you've seen or heard of it but this is the easiest recipe I've found so far:

1 box angel food cake mix

1 box any other flavored cake mix

*mix-ins like candy, nuts, marshmallows, etc.

Combine the two mixes together. Use 1/3 c. of the dry cake mixes and 3 T. of water into a mug or cup. Add any mix-ins. Microwave about 1 minute. Eat out of cup and top with ice cream or cool whip (optional).

 
I pinned a bunch of easy recipes on Pinterest as well that were classified as "meal upgrades". They were recipes that started out from a box of mac and cheese or a bag of Ramen noodles, and you add things to them to make them meals. See them here.


I made a Snickers salad which is always always always a huge hit!

1 red apple

1 green apple

1 Snickers candy bar

1 c. Cool Whip

12 oz. of yogurt (strawberry, vanilla, or cherry are best)

Fold yogurt and Cool Whip. Cut apples and Snickers into bite size pieces and fold into yogurt mixture.

While we ate dinner, I talked about how to grocery shop by browsing through the grocery ads you get in the mailbox. Then I touched on planning your meals beforehand (for a single person a week is usually a good time frame) so you know what you're going to buy when you shopping instead of just picking out a bunch of random items. I also suggested buying in bulk especially on meat or veggies/fruits so that you can freeze them for later. 

I know I probably say this a lot but even though we didn't have a lot of people, it was still a lot of fun. And if you have a big group it would be a big hit! I've done activities for our ward before where the guys break off from the girls and they each learn things about the other. Like since guys are usually really good with cars, the girls learned about cars. Women are generally good at things like cooking and sewing, the guys learned how to sew on a button or basic cooking tips. So this activity could really be adapted to a Young Men and Young Women activity as well. It'd be really great for those preparing to serve a mission! So I hope this has inspired you, and that you have fun with doing your own version of the activity.