Temple Marriage Activity

 This one of my favorite activities we've done so far. This came about because we had to skip the temple marriage lesson in the manual due to our stake leaders coming to teach that Sunday. As a presidency we all felt this was one of the MOST important lessons in the manual and we either needed to fit it in with the Sunday lessons or address it another way.

  Years ago I had found this idea through someone else serving in YW's and new it would be perfect for teaching the importance of a temple marriage. I'm sorry I can't give credit to the person who did this originally. This was also an activity we invited the mothers to as well.

Our invitations were wedding announcements, worded like an announcement, fancy font, etc. (sorry I didn't take a picture of ours) We went with a yellow and pink color scheme because we wanted to keep the yellow from our Arise and Shine theme for the year.

The basic outline of the evening was that we would divide into three groups. We would have three rooms set up to rotate to. One room was set up for the girls to try on wedding dresses and have their pictures taken. We send around a sign up sheet in Relief Society and Primary for anyone willing to loan us their wedding dress for the evening and had a great response. I think we had about 10 different dresses for the girls to choose from. We also are lucky enough to have someone who takes really good pictures.

Another room we had someone in the ward who was married in the temple, has had their children marry in the temple and has grandchildren speak. She spoke about how making the choice to married in the temple has influenced her children and the way she lives her life. She decorated her room to look "homey", while she spoke she turned the room lights off and only had on a lamp. She brought in one of the armchairs from the foyer and had lots of family pictures on the table.

The last room was the reception area and in here we had a women who was recently married in the temple speak about the decisions she made to make it to the temple and how making decisions young that the temple is your goal influenced how she lived her life. 

We also had all the YW leaders bring their wedding pictures and any other memorabilia they had to display. The girls LOVED to look at how different their leaders looked "back then". 

After all the classes we met back in the reception area for cake and a sweets bar. 

Isn't this cake amazing. One of our yw's mothers does cake decorating, lucky us!!

And of course we had to have our tables look like they might at a wedding reception

We got really great feed back from the girls about this night, as well as from their mothers. I hope they each made a greater resolve to live worthy to be married in the temple.