I LOVE YOU DAY
“Yesterday we held our first I Love You Day. It was a tremendous success! As a presidency, we personally visited each less-active child over the last 6 months. We mailed special invitations to each child for I Love You Day. If there were siblings, each child received his/her own invite. The active children were also given an invitation and a flyer to give to their friends. We had only 6 children missing from Primary! Our goal was to have SRO, and we did! We had a very special sharing time–focusing on loving one another, following the example of Christ, and the stories from BOM/NT where Jesus blessed the children. We told puppet stories and had all present participate in the “Web of Love.” Each person there sat in a circle on the floor. We had a huge ball of yarn that was tossed from person to person. The person tossing the ball held on to a portion of the yarn, and had to say something nice about the person he/she tossed it to. When 50 people got involved, the web was pretty big. At the end, each person got a portion of the web to take home, as a memento. We also baked mini-heart cakes for each child and prepared a treat bag with goodies — heart pencils, heart erasers, a religious bookmark (confection hearts with expressions like “Try Faith”) and a heart-shaped sucker. The treat bags were cellophane with hearts all over them. We then sang songs from the Children’s SB all about love. The non-members and less-active children joined in readily. We had a visitor from Idaho that said he wanted to attend our Primary all the time–it was more fun than his! The children had a great time and the spirit was so strong! We hope to make this an annual event, and we also hope that the children who came (less-actives and non-members) will accept our invitation to come every week and not just for the special occassion. As a side note, we used stories from Primary Page and Christy’s Primary Page. There are great ideas here that can be adapted for any situation. Our Stake Leaders were present, and very impressed with what we did. They commented on the number of children present–during Ward Conference we had 23 kids there and for I Love You Day, 40+!”