Movie night

For the past 3 or 4 years one of the primary activities has been a movie night. The kids love this night. This is the first year I have been involved with the movie night. I don't know why I didn't go last year because I was a primary teacher last year. The primary presidency (along with the help of some men who can set up projection TVs, DVD players, and screens) had 2 rooms set up with projection TVs, one for the senior primary and one for the junior primary. I think the hardest part for the primary presidency (my sister Christa is the president now) was picking out a G rated movie. Did you know that almost all of the animated movies or family movies for that matter that have been released within the last 5 years are almost all PG (that includes the Disney animated ones as well). What is up with that. I think they feel like they have to put in some bad words and some suggestive things so that the adults will like it. They wanted to pick 2 movies that most of the kids probably haven't seen before, but at the same time have them be fairly new releases. The movies were for the senior primary Everyone's Hero (the animated baseball movie very cute) and for the junior primary Horton Hears a Who.

A month before the movie night, each primary kid can earn 8 reverence bucks. You can earn up to 2 bucks per Sunday for four weeks, one if your reverent for class time the other if your reverent during singing and sharing time. If you are absent one week or if you weren't very reverent and didn't get a total of 8 bucks, you have the opportunity to earn the rest of your bucks the night of the movie. So the Sunday before the movie night, each kid was given a movie ticket to bring that Friday night.

The night of the movie we had 3 rooms set up, two for the movies and one for the concession. Once they signed in, they went to the concession room and picked up their bucks. If they didn't earn all 8, then the senior primary age had to say an article of faith and the junior primary had to either answer a simple question, say an article of faith if they knew one, or sing a primary song. If you earned all 8 being reverent and weren't absent at church, you got a little piece of candy as a bonus. Then after getting all 8 bucks, it was spending time. Each item cost 2 bucks so you could get a total of 4 things. The choices were hot dogs, popcorn, lemonade, and candy (not the movie size candy rather the size you see at grocery store check outs so not to small). After you bought a candy, you got your hand stamped because the rule was you could only buy one candy. Most kids got one of each thing. I was in charge of the popcorn. My parents have a big popcorn popper like they have at the theatre so we borrowed that. They have had this machine for years, but this is the first time I have ever used it. It was fun. I even had a couple senior primary helpers so they could pass it off on their Faith in God booklet. After the mad rush of kids buying all their goodies, it was movie time. The kids got to bring pillows, blankets, stuffed animals, and some even came in their PJ's. A while later I went into the movie rooms to see how things were and all the kids and I mean all were glued to the screen. We had the concession room vacuumed and cleaned up before the movies got over. So the only thing really needing to be done was vacuuming the 2 movie rooms and one hallway so not too bad. My kids love movie night. Some of them didn't want to spend all of their money and save it for the next movie night, but I talked them into spending it all after all next year will have the same choices.