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Come Follow Me Young Women’s Program
A couple of months ago I was asked to work with the young women ages 12-13, the beehives, for my church. You can learn more about my church here. One of my main responsibilities is to teach lessons to the girls on Sundays using the new Come Follow Me teaching program. I absolutely love how flexible and interactive the program is, and I’ve had a great time reading through the materials and adapting the materials to work with the young women that I teach.
Why Do The Choices I Make Matter Lesson Idea
This past week I taught a lesson on why do the choices I make matter and the things that I really wanted to focus on with the girls were making choices, the choices their consequences might have (good, bad, etc.), and how our days are filled with making choices and decisions. Rather than just talking about it with the girls, I created little choose your own adventure books and had the girls go through them during the class. If you’ve never read a choose your own adventure book, the basic idea is that you read a couple of pages in the story then at the end of those pages it lets you make a decision like “do you want to go through the door on the right or the door on the left,” and then based on your decision, you skip to another page in the book and continue your story. Each decision leads you somewhere different so there are a ton of different ways your story could go and end. Kind of like life, and I wanted to get that point across to the girls and thought a choose your own adventure story would be a great way to do it. Then afterwards we discussed what kind of choices they made, what kind of choices they have to make on a daily basis, and some other insights they gained from the activity. The books I made were just one day long books that had the girls starting when their alarm went off in the morning for school and ending in all different places – mutual, youth temple trip, after school, at a sleepover, etc. Some of the decisions they were asked to make were things like:
During lunch one of your friends pulls out a magazine with a “which celebrity would you most like to kiss” quiz. All of your other friends take it then pass it to you. The first sentence has words that make you feel uncomfortable – what do you do? And the girls have to make a decision on whether or not they will take the quiz or tell their friends it makes them uncomfortable and they don’t want to take it.When you get to school you see a girl standing all by herself – what do you do? Invite her to come hang out with your friends or smile as you walk by?
I purposely included decisions in the books that weren’t right or wrong decisions (like getting up when your alarm goes off or hitting the snooze button because you can sleep for a few minutes without being late), decisions that don’t really matter (whether to eat pizza or sandwiches for lunch), and good versus better decisions (joining a service oriented school club vs. going to mutual) so that we could talk about all of those types of decisions as a class. The girls seemed to really enjoy the activity and participated a ton after the activity. And p.s., who knew that apparently our middle school’s cafeteria pizza is gross, that was a big topic of debate.
Why Do the Choices I Make Matter Handouts
At the end of class, I also gave the girls handouts inspired by this activity. The handouts included chocolate covered pretzels and a quote that said, “When it comes to making decisions, don’t just flip a choice. Always ask yourself direction the decision will lead and choose accordingly. I printed out the handouts, cut with a 3″ circle punch, and taped the handouts to cute foodsafe paper bags full of chocolate covered pretzels (FLIPZ).
Download the Free Printables
If you’re ready to download the free printables to use this idea, simply click the button below or click here. Print out one sheet for each of the girls then put them in order and staple together with the covers that I made using a quote from this talk. And if you use them in class or for an activity, I would love to hear about it!
