2017 LDS Youth Theme Posters

With the new year, comes a new spiritual theme for LDS Youth. The 2017 LDS youth theme for this year is the scripture James 1:5-6.

I work with some amazing young ladies, so I get to learn and work on the theme each year. Every year the theme is based on a scripture. For the whole year we spend time memorizing and focusing on activities that represent this theme.

So to start the year off right, I am teaching a lesson about asking and praying to your Father in Heaven for answers. I made the above poster to help with the memorization of the full scripture reference. I also made a simplified poster inspired by this moving VIDEO  introducing the theme.

I am really excited about this theme and the reminder it is that we are children of a loving Heavenly Father who wants to hear from us. He wants to know our questions. He wants to answer us. He is there for us.

Both of these printables can be downloaded as posters. I will only be printing off the full scripture as a poster. I will be using the simplified image as cards that they can put in their scriptures, hang up in a locker, or put on their mirror.

I put together a printable with this smaller option. I suggest printing them on cardstock.

Download 2017 Youth Theme Poster HERE
Download 2017 Youth Theme Simple Poster HERE
Download 2017 Youth Theme Simple cards HERE

Happy New Year. I hope you find these printable useful and that they help inspire your youth.

An UPlifting evening: YWIE

A lot of you who have been around for awhile know that I serve with the young women in my church. For the majority of my adult life, I have been lucky enough to serve in this organization. Young Women's is pretty much my favorite place to be.

Who wouldn't want to be surrounded by such awesomeness all the time? Between the girls themselves and the other women I serve with I am pretty much the luckiest gal ever.

Twice a year we hold larger than normal activities. At the end of the year we hold an night called Young Women in Excellence. We have a special evening geared around a spiritual theme and we allow the girls to display something they have accomplished during the year.

Our theme this year was "Be UPlifting". We of course used the Disney Movie UP as part of our theme. Hence the mini UP house at the beginning of the post.

We decorated the room with lots of color. Colors that we pulled from the UP house and from this poster that I made (of course using PicMonkey). That banner is made from paper goodie bags I bought at Zurchers. I just bought a variety and then sewed them all together. I ended up getting two big banners out of four packages of bags.

For our program we watched a really powerful video about serving called LIFT. If you haven't seen this video yet, I think you should. It has such a great message.

Then we had a guest speaker talk all about how we can uplift others through service and through our example. We were so lucky to have our speaker. She is such a great example of this principle and I am glad the girls were able to learn from her.

After the program, we had refreshments and walked around the room to look at all of the girls' displays.

This UP house was quite the hit. I am gonna be honest, it was SO much fun to make. I was a bit of a nerd about it. Making this house really was a labor of love.

I used images of the house I found on the internet to construct the frame of the house. I constructed the house out of foam board and hot glue. Needless to say I severely altered my fingerprints by the end.

I covered the exterior of the house with paper. Lots and lots and LOTS of paper. I went through a lot of glue sticks, of both the regular and hot glue variety. I cut strips, punched out circles, and made windows all of paper.

Then of course, I added balloons.

The house isn't to scale and it is missing a few key items (like the front railing and the hose). However, I still love it.

We also found these really cute colorful sodas at Zurchers. They totally reminded me of the soda cap pin that Ellie gives Carl in the movie.

We had such a great evening. I love my girls and I love being in Young Women's.

Like I said earlier, I made this poster as a decoration. I ended up using this background for a lot of things. I used it for the invites and for the programs as well. I just omitted the words on this poster so that I could add the information for the invites and the programs.

I wanted to make this poster available for anyone who wanted to use it. So here it is. You can right click on the image and save it as jpeg. I find as a jpeg it prints better as a photo. I printed mine off as a poster at a local store and I was really happy with it.

I hope you find this idea useful. At the very least I hope you love this poster and can find a place to hang it. Thanks everyone for reading!

Stop by tomorrow for details on how I made the invites for this night.

Donut Forget You Are Special

We recently had an activity at church with our young women all about how special we all are. We played a game that was an object lesson based on the book You Are Special by Max Lucado.

After the game we talked about trying not to judge other. We also talked about not letting what others think bother you. The only thing that matters is knowing who our Maker is and how special we are in His eyes.

Since I think every activity needs to have a handout and/or food, I made a handout to give to each girl. I bought some donuts and put them in a cute paper bag. I made a tag to go on the front of the bag.

These tags could be used for a Sunday School class, a school classroom, or for anyone needing a little reminder of how special they are.

print off HERE

Young Women Faith Garden Dinner

I have the amazing privilege to be in the presence of over twenty amazing young women on a weekly basis. I get to be in their presence, plan activities for them, support them, and learn from them. 

Over a month ago while checking my Instagram feed (follow along with me @larissa_anotherday), I saw a magical image of an orchard dinner by the always inspiring Stephanie Nielson (Nie Nie Dialogues). Right away I knew I wanted to do something like that for my girls.

With the help of ALL the wonderful women I serve with, we pulled of a magical evening of Faith for our girls. 

Our evening was centered around the idea of having faith and not fear. We wanted to have an inspiring night that helped the girls prepare and plan for a new school year.

We had access to the perfect spot.

We set up three long banquet tables and covered them with white tablecloths. We had a varying collection of white plate, glasses, and silverware that all came from the adults. I loved how the mix-match dishes gave a vintage feel to the evening.

We also hung cafe lights over the table. We luckily had a canopy of trees to attach the lights to. The lights gave such a magical feeling to the night. They were also bright enough that when it got darker we could still see everything.

We used flowers and jars/glass vases as centerpieces. We used baby's breath, inexpensive daisies, and fresh cut hydrangeas from my front yard. We had a variety of mason jars and glass vases. Again with the idea of mix-matching. Then I just varied how I put the flowers in all the containers.

In Stephanie's original image on Instagram, the girls were wearing white shirts and they had on flower crowns. Wearing white shirts fit with our themed Faith Night and I just adored the idea of flower crowns. We told the girls ahead of time to wear white shirts. We made simple baby's breath flower crowns. Using baby's breath allowed it stayed affordable.

When the girls arrived, we gathered them away from the table and gave them an introduction to the evening. Then we led them to where the table was. The oohs and ahhs were so heart-warming. We gave them each a flower crown and had them sit down.

Don't they look so very beautiful??

We ate before the message.

The menu was so simple and easy. We had rolls and salad. Each adult there brought a different kind of salad. With such an easy meal set up, it was easier for us to focus on creating the environment and it allowed us to sit down with the girls and eat together.

We ate and talked.

It was simply magical. I have used that word a lot in this post, but there really is no other word to describe it.

After everyone was done eating, we had a special message about faith versus fear. We listened to a beautiful message about relying on Christ when we face all the decisions and experiences of life. I feel that we all came away with a little more resolve to have faith over feeling fear.

I am so grateful for all the women who helped create this special night. I am also very grateful for these beautiful pictures that were taken for us by my friend's SIL. She was able to capture the spirit and the beauty of this evening and allow us to forever keep this memory with us.

Sunday Lessons: Forgiveness Handout

Happy Sunday! Over a month ago I gave a lesson in church about forgiveness.

A big part of the lesson was about the concept of letting go. When we hold on to grudges and allow past wrongs to continue to hurt us, really we are hurting ourselves more than the one we are not forgiving.

There is also a bit of the Golden Rule where forgiveness is concerned.

None of us are perfect, and we all are in need of forgiveness. As we hope for forgiveness, we must also be willing to give forgiveness.

That can be hard.

But it is doable.

I loved this quote by the Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley--

"May God help us to be a little kinder, showing

 greater forbearance, to be more forgiving,

more willing to walk the second milk, 

to reach down and lift up...

to lay aside old grudges and nurture

them no more."

I centered my hand out for the girls on this quote.

Since forgiveness is all about healing, both others and ourselves, I thought it would be cute to attach a band-aid to the handout.

I simply printed off the Forgiveness Tags (which I made using PicMonkey...do you guys ever get tired of me talking about that site???).

Here is the tag for you--

(right click on the tag image, save to the computer and insert to a Word document)

Then just hole punch a bunch of band-aids and each handout. Tie the band-aids to the handouts.

A lovely little reminder of the importance of forgiving others. I love the part of the quote that says, "to lay old grudges and nurture them no more".

I think I shall work on that!

Evening in Excellence and Other Stuff

Young Womens, Young Womens, Young Womens. Here is a post of some things we have done in the last couple of months.

Evening In Excellence

The theme for Evening in Excellence this year was Find A Treasure. It obviously centered around finding a treasure. We started the evening with a dessert bar of fondue and tons of yummy dip-ables. I wanted to start the evening with dessert so that we could end the night on a spiritual note. During dessert is also when everyone was able to walk around and see the girls' Personal Progress project displays.

At the end of the dessert portion, every girl opened up a treasure map that had been placed in a treasure chest on every table. The treasure map (which was just a simple download after googling treasure maps...I tried making my own but an hour later realized that was the least important thing to do right then) lead the girls to three different stops before the final treasure. Each stop was a room, marked with an image correlating with the clue. In the room was a leader who read a quote about their divine worth. The final room was marked with a giant red "X".

This room was decorated with tons of mirrors of all shapes and sizes. The purpose was to imply that the treasure was themselves. Once all the girls filed in, we had a guest speaker who centered her talk on the scripture Proverbs 31:10 combined with talking about their divine worth and recognizing that in a world that would have them forget it.

Each girl got to take home an individual mirror with a jeweled tag on the back that said, "Remember what a treasure you are".

The night truly was spectacular.

Another idea from our September activities--

The whole month of activities was geared toward learning about Joseph Smith and the time he lived

    

     learned to embroidery

learned about Emma Smith

     fact scavenger hunt

     the girls worked on individual projects to help them gain a testimony of him, which included learning a    hymn, drawing pictures, reading, embroidery

    the month ended with a program with guest speaker and musical number that was set perfectly to a section of the church produced film on the restoration

Some of the activities we have coming up:

making family trees and "remember when" books for each girls family

visiting a family history center

a progressive dinner at the leaders homes

YW Projects and Posts

I know I have a couple of friends in the Young Women's program. Sometimes it seems impossible to come up with new fun, yet meaningful, activities. This is the third ward I have been in YW's. I absolutely love it. I always want to make sure I am offering creative and thoughtful lessons, activities, handouts, etc.

WELL I have decided that a couple times a month I am going to post some YW ideas, whether they be something I have done or something I have come across that I want to do. There are tons of really fun ideas out there and some really awesome/creative women who come up with them. So let's start spreading the love.

For this post I am going to share two projects and one idea.

First, a bracelet that was made out of washers. This projects has moved rapidly around the blogging universe. In fact, I can't even remember which site I originally got it from. However, it was really easy. Here are the basics (and someday I will plan ahead enough in advance to show pics like a real grown up tutorial)--

Supplies:

washers (I used 1/4 inch washers, they make them in all sizes)

hemp cord

jewelry fasteners

scrap paper

wooden beads

diamond glaze (find it at craft stores)

jewelry glue

spray adhesive or mod podge

1. Trace out pattern of washer on the backside of paper (so pencil lines don't show up on pretty side). Cut it out.

2. Use spray adhesive on washer then place paper on it pretty side up. Let it set for a little bit.

3. Apply diamond glaze. Outlining edges first and then carefully filling in (yes here is where a picture would have been helpful).

HARD PART- Your project has to sit still for 3 days fully allowing diamond glaze to set up.

4. Measure ankle/wrist, be generous, then triple. Cut the length in half. Fold each half in half and then loop on each side of washer. Then string on a bead on each side.

5. Attach your fasteners to end of hemp.

How you attach will vary on the fasteners you bought. Also, your method of attaching them might be different than mine. I tied on, trimmed and then glued the ends to make sure they stayed.

There is your pretty bracelet.

On to the second thing for the week. I had five Laurels leaving us and going to college (boo hoo). We decided to have a class bbq for them to say good bye. I also wanted to give them a little going away present. I decided to make them little half aprons. There is no how-to for this one. First because I always kind of fly by the seat of my pants. Two because most of you sew better than I do.

All I will say is this...you can totally do something like this with out a pattern. Just buy a yard of something cute and grab a little bit of some coordinating fabrics. Mess around with how you want it to look and then just sew the sucker together.

So here is my lovely little half apron.

On a side note, we played a funny game at the bbq. It was called a wet t-shirt contest...no I am not that kind of leader. It was called that because you take big t-shirts get them wet, fold them up and then freeze them. The contest is who can pull theirs a part and put it on the fastest. It was pretty stinking funny.
There are some of my YW project/activities for the last month. I hope that these ideas helped someone in the blogosphere. I also hope that any marvelous YW ideas you have come my way too.
PS In September we are doing a month of activities geared towards learning about and gaining a testimony of Joseph Smith. Please feel free to let me know of any ideas you might have.