As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I am in a period of change. For those of you who follow the Church, you’ll know that 2019 marks the beginning of a new Sunday schedule for us. We’re trading in a 3-hour block of meetings for a home-focused church supported by 2 hours of meetings on Sunday. For the past few years, I have had the privilege of taking care of the children ages 18 months to 12 years in our ward (aka congregation). Up until this year, we’ve had almost two hours every Sunday with our kiddos. They would spend half of this time in small classes organized by age group. The rest of the time, we got together to sing songs and discuss gospel topics as a larger group.
With the change in our Sunday schedule, we’re losing a lot of time with our littles! While this is going to be SO good for them in SO many ways, there are a lot of things we won’t have time for on Sundays anymore. Things like spotlights, birthday celebrations, sharing weekday activity announcements, etc. Just because we won’t be spending time on these things on Sundays, though, doesn’t make them unimportant. In an effort to streamline the process of sharing this kind of information, I took some time to put together an editable newsletter for our Primary. It has room to highlight birthdays, weekday activity announcements, information about what topics we’ll be focusing on each Sunday, and contact information for various leaders. We will be updating and emailing out a newsletter every month to keep the parents of our kids in-the-know. So . . . why am I writing a blog post about this?
Well, when I finally got things looking the way I wanted them to, I realized that this kind of thing takes lots of time – something we all have a limited supply of. I started thinking about the many, many other Primary groups world-wide that will be facing these same challenges with me, and realized that this newsletter template could give somebody else the ability to focus their time on something other than getting Primary announcements out the the families of their kiddos. If you’re interested in checking out what I’ve come up with, click on one of the images below. One will take you to a docx file you can download and edit for your own use. The other is a printable version that you can fill in by hand.
