Activity Days: Prophet's counsel on a wooden block

I was in charge of our Activity Days yesterday, so I decided to help the girls work in their books, on Learning and Living the Gospel, and the fourth bullet point on that list: "Read a recent conference address given by the prophet. Decide what you can do to follow the prophet, and do it."

I started by printing off a copy of President Monson's closing remarks from last General Conference (October 2012) for each of the girls. I needed it to be a shorter talk so that we could get through the whole thing by taking turns reading out loud. As we read the talk, we stopped and talked about various parts of the talk, and each of the girls underlined some of the things on their own copy of the talk, that they might want to remember. We were specifically looking for things the prophet counseled us to try to work on.

We talked about each of the things he mentioned and made sure that each of the girls understood them, so that they were able to know exactly what it was that President Monson spoke to each of us about.

After we discussed the talk thoroughly, I gave them each a block that Bob engraved for us (on his magic laser machine). The blocks were left over from another project, and I already had the eye screws and ribbon, so I didn't have to buy anything at all. Love it when that happens!

The top of the block looked like this:

And then on each of the sides, he engraved one of the things that President Monson mentioned in his talk that we should try to work on.

On the bottom of the blocks, he engraved the girls' names.

I let the girls pick through my scraps of ribbon to tie whatever colors they wanted to the eye screw so that it was something cute that they could put on their dresser or by their bed as a reminder of things to work on being better at. They are going to try to work on one side of the block for one week, then turn it so that another side shows, and work on that one for a week, and so on.

Easy, non-messy little craft item that hopefully serves as a nice reminder of what we each need to do to follow the prophet's counsel.

Now, if you don't have a magic laser machine handy, another way to do it would be to print off each of the words on heavy scrapbook paper, cut them into squares the size of the block, and mod podge each to the various sides. It would be really cute that way, too!