In the summer, many families look forward to gathering with loved ones they don’t get to see very often. If you’re planning a family reunion this year, the important thing is the act of gathering itself—spending time together, making memories, and sharing in family love.
Here are a few ways to help your little ones get more actively involved in the reunion and enjoy creating memories together.
Play Family History Bingo
Kids will obviously know what their grandparents look like now, but what about what they looked like in their younger years? Or what about their great-grandparents and even more distant generations?
If you have enough historical family photos (and even if you think you don’t, check FamilySearch—you may have more ancestor photos than you think!), you could create Family History bingo cards and gather the kids to test their knowledge of who’s who.
If you need help creating your bingo cards, here’s a great tutorial to point you in the right direction.
Family History Story Time
This would be a great activity to do around a campfire or when the kids inevitably say, “I’m bored!” You could ask some of the more seasoned adults in the family to come prepared with a funny, captivating, or scary story about one of your ancestors (FamilySearch Memories is a great resource for this!).
Then, gather the little ones around for story time, complete with a storyteller’s chair and the kids all seated in front of them, hopefully grinning from ear to ear, anxiously awaiting the next new story.
Ask a Missionary
Most returned missionaries are more than happy to share stories from their mission. And positive, heartwarming, faith-promoting stories can help reinforce kids’ interest in serving a mission when they reach that age.
Stories of what serving a mission was like decades ago can be fascinating, but if you have a recently returned young missionary or a senior couple who have served a mission, they could certainly provide interesting, more modern-day stories and examples, too!
Here are some sample questions the kids could ask:
- What did you love about where you served your mission?
- What was the most interesting thing you ate on your mission?
- Why did you want to go on a mission?
- Did you have any fun companions?
- What was the funniest thing that happened on your mission?
- (If they spoke another language): Can you say something for us in your mission language?
Or leave it open-ended—sometimes that results in the most fun questions!
Dress up like an Ancestor
This could be as simple as having a “dress-up box” with costumes and wigs at the reunion and a display of interesting family photos for the kids to replicate. You could also have an adult take photos of the recreations and award a prize for the best ancestral doppelgänger.
Or if a “dress-up box” is out of the question, make it a coloring station and have the kids try to draw a portrait of their ancestors instead!
Play “Who’s That Baby?”
For our family reunion this summer, we’re asking everyone to send in their baby photo. At the reunion, we’ll have each photo on a display board, and family members will be invited to try and guess who the baby is in each photo.
It’s fun to see what everyone looked like at such a young age—and where distinctive family physical traits like that cleft chin or widow’s peak may have come from! This could be another opportunity to award a prize (or a second scoop of ice cream) to the person who can guess the most baby photos correctly.
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For even more ideas, check out this RootsTech video of 20 kid-friendly family history activity ideas:
