Primary Activities


Grunt
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1 hour ago, Grunt said:

Has anyone seen any curriculum for the Primary Activities program?   Any guidelines at all?   I must be looking in the wrong place because I can't find a thing.  

This might help out @Grunt.

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The Children and Youth website includes more than 100 activities and service ideas for families, children and youth — with more to come. Service ideas can also come from JustServe.org or the JustServe app. 

Speaking to children and Primary leaders, Sister Jones said, “Activity Days are now called Primary activities, and they are for girls and for boys. … We hope you hold Primary activities two to four times per month if that’s possible and practical.

Primary activities should be led by at least two women, two men or a married couple. While boys and girls will generally meet separately, they may combine for some activities, she said. 

As far as I'm aware there isn't much more released at this time, nor am I sure they will be releasing anything in the near future.
It appears that activities are planned by the kids and the adult leaders. The Church is offering some ideas (click here), but there isn't a curriculum per se, yet.
I'm sure dates and times of activities can be worked out with your Primary President and the Bishop.

Edited by NeedleinA
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2 hours ago, Grunt said:

Has anyone seen any curriculum for the Primary Activities program?   Any guidelines at all?   I must be looking in the wrong place because I can't find a thing.  

Your Stake/Ward Primary Presidency would have the guidelines for your ward.  The main concept was released last year.  The kids (and their families) would have already went through and filled out the pamphlet of what they want to do to accomplish the four areas of growth.  Your Presidencies probably have them.  You can get ideas of the activities for your Primary Activities program from these to help the kids accomplish their stated objectives.

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8 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

Your Stake/Ward Primary Presidency would have the guidelines for your ward.  The main concept was released last year.  The kids (and their families) would have already went through and filled out the pamphlet of what they want to do to accomplish the four areas of growth.  Your Presidencies probably have them.  You can get ideas of the activities for your Primary Activities program from these to help the kids accomplish their stated objectives.

The Primary President doesn't have anything and is leaving it up to us. I'll see if I can find that pamphlet and do it at our first meeting.  

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Just now, Grunt said:

Thanks.   Yeah, I saw that stuff but was hoping for more direction.   Apparently our ward never really had Activity Days (even though we took over the calling) so we just made our own schedule and followed Faith in God.  I guess I'll make up our own plan, pending further instruction.   

I'm Scout den leader which is now Primary Activities for the boys.  We're still segregated so I still get boys to teach.  Our Primary Presidency has either not gathered the kids' goals or they have but just hasn't given it to us.  I start the new activities next week.  So I plan to just spend all of January having the kids come up with their objectives for the four areas of growth and we build the activities together.

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3 minutes ago, Grunt said:

The Primary President doesn't have anything and is leaving it up to us. I'll see if I can find that pamphlet and do it at our first meeting.  

Yep!  That's what I'm doing.  I'm spending all of January on it - have the kids fill out their objectives and come up with activity ideas for the next 3 months.

Edited by anatess2
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1 minute ago, anatess2 said:

I'm Scout den leader which is now Primary Activities for the boys.  We're still segregated so I still get boys to teach.  Our Primary Presidency has either not gathered the kids' goals or they have but just hasn't given it to us.  I start the new activities next week.  So I plan to just spend all of January having the kids come up with their objectives for the four areas of growth and we build the activities together.

I have 14 kids this year of mixed gender and age.  We'll see how this shakes out.  It feels weird just being handed a program and told "build it, good luck".  
 

Mrs Grunt is much better at this, thankfully.   

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8 minutes ago, Grunt said:

I have 14 kids this year of mixed gender and age.  We'll see how this shakes out.  It feels weird just being handed a program and told "build it, good luck".  
 

Mrs Grunt is much better at this, thankfully.   

I'm lucky to only have 7 kids, all boys, ages 7-10.  I have 2 sons that are in their late teens now who I've helped through Scouts and school/church activities, so I'm comfortable with doing/designing/knowing what works and what doesn't about boy things.  I've been the doing the "build it, good luck" thing for about 3 years now since our Scout program doesn't work the way BSA designs it.  Our ward did not call enough den leaders to cover all BSA dens since we have dens that only has 1 kid in it and parents and kids alike don't care to earn belt loops or patches as they don't even care to get uniforms to loop the belt loops on or sew the patches to.  So we combined all 3 dens into 1 den and I get to be Den leader that designed all the monthly activities.

This time though, I'm needing to let the kids design the activities instead of pouring through the BSA manuals.  So that's gonna be the main challenge. 

I'll share what we come up with in case you have kids with similar interests.

Edited by anatess2
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8 minutes ago, mordorbund said:

Just for my own curiosity:

Are you guys meeting 2 or 4 times each month?

In our ward, Activity Days met every other week, Scouts met 3 times a month (one pack meeting, 2 den meetings) with one week or the occasional 5th week set as homework.  Since October, the Activity Days has joined the Scouts in the pack meeting so both have been meeting 3 times a month.  We have no more planned Pack Meetings (no more BSA), so we have not set any meetings for the first week of the month.  So, I guess in the new year, we'll only meet twice a month unless the Primary Girls and Primary Boys leaders get together and come up with a joint activity.

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1 hour ago, mordorbund said:

Just for my own curiosity:

Are you guys meeting 2 or 4 times each month?

Currently we meet twice a month.  We're going to see how that goes.  We are running into a little difficulty with the class size and age ranges based on last year's experience, particularly with several kids that need special attention.   We've thought about breaking the class up and continue meeting twice a month for each group, though that would mean twice the work for us.  

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  • pam featured this topic

Remember the point is for it to be 'home-centered, church supported'. So - parents sit down with their kid/s and come up with goals in the various categories. You then ask the parents what those goals are and come up with activities and then inform them what you're doing when so they can see how you (the church) is supporting their family/kids objectives. A leader designing things with the kids sounds like the parents are getting bypassed when they should be front and center.

For example - Sam sits down with mom and dad and decides he'd like to run a 5k. Great! So mom & dad let you know that and you tell them you'll plan an activity that will help increase his fitness/stamina. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, mom & dad are encouraging their son to put down the video games and run some laps because the race is coming up. They're still the ones to make sure he's ready and shows up but you planned and did something to be supportive and help Sam reach his worthy goal. 

Edited by Manners Matter
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Chiming in again - I think it's going to be important for parents/leaders to teach/encourage a 'growth mindset' with all this (google it). Sometimes a person doesn't reach their goal and/or things don't go the way you hope and resilience, perseverance are important things to learn. Seeing mistakes as effort and not failure can make a big difference as well as understanding the idea of 'progress not perfection'. A leader can help Sam understand that winning the race isn't important but finishing is. 

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11 hours ago, Manners Matter said:

Remember the point is for it to be 'home-centered, church supported'. So - parents sit down with their kid/s and come up with goals in the various categories. You then ask the parents what those goals are and come up with activities and then inform them what you're doing when so they can see how you (the church) is supporting their family/kids objectives. A leader designing things with the kids sounds like the parents are getting bypassed when they should be front and center.

For example - Sam sits down with mom and dad and decides he'd like to run a 5k. Great! So mom & dad let you know that and you tell them you'll plan an activity that will help increase his fitness/stamina. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, mom & dad are encouraging their son to put down the video games and run some laps because the race is coming up. They're still the ones to make sure he's ready and shows up but you planned and did something to be supportive and help Sam reach his worthy goal. 

Getting parents to be involved is the biggest failure we had in Boy Scouts.

Edited by anatess2
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So, my kids never got anything to take home to work on with us.  Were they supposed to?  As I'm researching what we're going to do next week and putting together a plan for the year, I'm finding booklets and things online for certain groups.  My REALLY stupid question is:  What do they consider primary?  I see books for "Children" and other books for "Youth", but nothing for Primary.  Does it fall into one of those categories?

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1 hour ago, Grunt said:

So, my kids never got anything to take home to work on with us.  Were they supposed to? 

You can if you want to.  I've never done so as the Activity Days leader.

1 hour ago, Grunt said:

  As I'm researching what we're going to do next week and putting together a plan for the year, I'm finding booklets and things online for certain groups.  My REALLY stupid question is:  What do they consider primary?  I see books for "Children" and other books for "Youth", but nothing for Primary.  Does it fall into one of those categories?

~ Ages 18 mo - 12 years = Children = Primary 

~ Ages 12 years - 18 years = Youth = Young Men and Young Women's.

Now that being said, you obviously want to tailor things to your particular class.  If you think something in the "youth" booklet will be good for your mature 10's year olds, then use it.  And on most days, you probably don't want to use the little kids wiggle stuff for older primary kids. 

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56 minutes ago, Jane_Doe said:

You can if you want to.  I've never done so as the Activity Days leader.

~ Ages 18 mo - 12 years = Children = Primary 

~ Ages 12 years - 18 years = Youth = Young Men and Young Women's.

Now that being said, you obviously want to tailor things to your particular class.  If you think something in the "youth" booklet will be good for your mature 10's year olds, then use it.  And on most days, you probably don't want to use the little kids wiggle stuff for older primary kids. 

So far they've all been meeting together, which has been a little bit of a problem.  7 year olds and 11 year olds are very different, more so when they mix boys and girls.

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On 12/31/2019 at 9:48 AM, anatess2 said:

Getting parents to be involved is the biggest failure we had in Boy Scouts.

I think parent involvement has been a problem too often and it seems Salt Lake is trying to change that. If I were a leader, I wouldn't want to hinder the shift so I would try the following options:

~ Email the parents (cc the prim counselor) explaining how you want to support the home-centered program and ask they respond with the goals their child/ren have decided on so you can make plans. If they don't respond to the email, stop them in the hall at church and be enthusiastic about helping them (enthusiasm goes over better than impatience, for lack of a better term).

~ First activity in January is a parent night (invite prim and bishopric counselors). Set up different seating stations and have copies of the guidebook. When they're done with their chat, they give you a copy of their goals and enjoy refreshments while they wait for the others to finish. Once everyone is done, the bishopric counselor then emphasizes the importance of the change and how it will only be successful with the parents. You can then share your excitement for this calling and also lay the ground rules (ie parents of those that misbehave will be expected to attend until the behavior improves, etc). Then end with a fun game. If attendance is low, repeat later when you need more goals to support with activities.

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44 minutes ago, Manners Matter said:

I think parent involvement has been a problem too often and it seems Salt Lake is trying to change that. If I were a leader, I wouldn't want to hinder the shift so I would try the following options:

~ Email the parents (cc the prim counselor) explaining how you want to support the home-centered program and ask they respond with the goals their child/ren have decided on so you can make plans. If they don't respond to the email, stop them in the hall at church and be enthusiastic about helping them (enthusiasm goes over better than impatience, for lack of a better term).

~ First activity in January is a parent night (invite prim and bishopric counselors). Set up different seating stations and have copies of the guidebook. When they're done with their chat, they give you a copy of their goals and enjoy refreshments while they wait for the others to finish. Once everyone is done, the bishopric counselor then emphasizes the importance of the change and how it will only be successful with the parents. You can then share your excitement for this calling and also lay the ground rules (ie parents of those that misbehave will be expected to attend until the behavior improves, etc). Then end with a fun game. If attendance is low, repeat later when you need more goals to support with activities.

Everything you mentioned here is not a January activity.  This was an October activity.  We tried to do all that already.  As a matter of fact, we did that every year with Scouting.  We planned Scouting activities with the parents for the entire calendar year starting in October.  Scouting is not much different from this new Primary Activity.  It is all parent-children designed activities.  The only difference is that the BSA sets certain requirements to get awards for certain achievements whereas the new activities set up is the requirements/awards are parent-children designed as well.  Scout den leaders just facilitate the activities just like what primary activity people are gonna be doing in the new program. 

At least with Scouting, if the parents don't get involved, the den leaders would just pick an adventure from the massive list of BSA adventures that they feel their den would be interested in and run the den according to BSA requirements for that adventure.  This time, the primary leaders will be running blind without the parent's involvement.  What I plan to do is, if parent involvement ends up like Scouting, then I'll just do what I always do - pick an adventure from the BSA manual that the kids would like to set as a goal.  There are tons of really cool ones like the Super Science, Bear Necessities, and Duty to God adventures...

Edited by anatess2
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22 hours ago, Grunt said:

So, my kids never got anything to take home to work on with us.  Were they supposed to?  As I'm researching what we're going to do next week and putting together a plan for the year, I'm finding booklets and things online for certain groups.  My REALLY stupid question is:  What do they consider primary?  I see books for "Children" and other books for "Youth", but nothing for Primary.  Does it fall into one of those categories?

Children is primary.  Youth is Young Men/Women.

In our ward last October, we had a combined EQ/RS meeting where all the Primary and Youth also were in attendance.  We had videos of the new Primary/Youth program and the Bishopric explaining the new program.  Then they handed out the pamphlets for each family to fill out with their children.  As a Den, we started to wean off the BSA requirements and started free-flowing.  Unfortunately, our Primary Presidency spent October through Christmas preparing for the Sacrament Meeting Primary Program that we didn't have until 2 Sundays before Christmas so we never got good coordination to get the pamphlets back or any support for the planning of next year's activities.  And that's why, I'm going to end up winging it this year.

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