Mother-Daughter Dinner ~ Activity Days

This has been my first year serving in the Primary as one of the Activity Days leaders and I have loved everything about it! Working with 9-11 year old girls is so much fun...I've learned a lot about them and myself this year, which has also helped my relationship with Heavenly Father grow as well.

One of our responsibilities as leaders is to organize a yearly Mother-Daughter activity that is meant to be even more special than the other activities. After browsing Pinterest over and over and over again, I came across this blog and knew right then and there that this would be the perfect theme for our Mother/Daughter night... Several of my friends have asked for an outline of what exactly went into putting this activity together, so I decided to write this post with tips and sources that I hope may be helpful to many of you who are also serving in this wonderful calling! :)

The theme was "I've Already Decided" and focused on the transcendental importance of a deep, genuine, and constant communication bond between mothers and their daughters. I wish I had taken pictures of the activity in its progress! The girls and mothers had so much fun and I think they all left feeling very loved by their mother/daughter and with a resolve to nourish their relationship by strengthening their communication skills with each other.


So, first off: the invites. I printed the invitations on thin card stock and then used a Martha Stewart Crafts Doily Lace Edge Punch on the edges. I had to experiment with the placing before I got it to fit just right..
The decorations came mostly from my favorite online party supply shop, a.k.a Creative Juice Cafe.  The lovely doilies were simply folded in half and placed on their darling Natural with Gold Shimmer Twine. No need to glue, staple, or tape. Just place it on! Super easy! The twine was hung across the room in zig-zag patterns and help up with basic Scotch tape.

The centerpieces were tiny bottles of Starbucks mocha somethings from Costco. They came in a pack of 12 for about $9 which is a pretty good deal. Don't worry, I poured the drinks straight into my sink, popped them in my dishwasher, and they were ready to go! A trip to Costco for a bouquet of tulips for $10 (also a screaming deal) and some burlap later, and we were ready for those tables. Each table had 3 mason jars lined with the same 6-inch doilies and filled with goodies for the "I Spy Gospel Standards" Jar game. {See previously mentioned blog post for more info on this game...She even has downloadable printables for it!} One thing I did do differently from what Kolette did, was omit the rice...I was worried it would make a mess and honestly, it took long enough to just dump the little items out onto the table to sort and figure out what "gospel standard" it belonged to.
 For dinner, we had arugula chicken salad stuffed croissants (croissants from Costco, chicken salad made by my amazing friend Laura who is starting her very own catering company in Pleasant Grove, Utah!), fresh fruit salad, and homemade brownies from scratch. It gets a little hard to whip up a fancy meal with a very limited budget, but I think it turned out perfectly! I wish I had remembered to photograph the food table as well...There's always something I forget to do! :(
Aren't those wooden utensils just darling and the perfect touch?! They are also from Creative Juice Cafe.
Dinner was the first part of our activity. Afterwards, we did the "I Spy Gospel Standards Jar" game, Mother-Daughter Trivia using dry erase boards and markers for their answers, discussed Mother~Daughter Journals, and watched a video I put together in iMovie of pictures of the girls with their moms, with snipits of Elder Ballard's talk "Mothers and Daughters" set to background music of Ginger Fairbanks' "Love is Spoken Here/Families Can Be Together Forever" medley which you can listen to here or purchase on iTunes.

 

After the video, we handed out a journal for each mother-daughter couple (journals were just composition notebooks bought from Walmart for $0.88 each and then decorated with scrapbook paper and good ol' Mod Podge. Each journal also had inside a letter from daughters for their moms and viceversa...We had the girls write the letters for their moms about a month in advance on a regular Activity Day where we discussed how to properly write letters. I think both moms and daughters were pleasantly surprised to read a letter that they had written for each other. :) I know this post may be a little all over the place, but I hope it gives you a good enough idea of what our activity turned out like. I will look into how I can post the "worksheets" we used for the Mother-Daughter Trivia game and the Journal Tips and Prompts sheet. Anyone have any ideas on how I would go about doing this??

 :) xoxo, Kristal.