Come Follow Me Activities with Printable Cards, by Age Group

Every teacher has had this happen. You plan a great activity, the kids love it, they are laughing, they are engaged, and then class ends and you realize nobody ever connected the activity back to the scripture. It was fun. It just was not a lesson.

That gap is the whole problem with activities in Come Follow Me teaching. An activity is not automatically a good use of class time. It is only good if the doing of it teaches the doctrine, rather than just decorating a point you were going to make anyway. This post is about how to close that gap, with real examples across age groups, and what to do when the resource center is locked, the copier is broken, or you simply forgot the cardstock at home.

The Activity Should Teach, Not Decorate

Here is the test I use now before I plan any activity: could a class member walk away from this activity able to state the principle in their own words, even if I never said it out loud? If the answer is no, the activity is decoration. It might still be worth doing for engagement or for fun, but it is not carrying the lesson.

A decorating activity looks like this: you teach the principle first, then you do a craft or game that is loosely themed around it. The kids color a picture of Noah's ark after you have already explained faith and obedience. The craft reinforces nothing because the thinking already happened. It is just something to do with their hands while they wait for the closing prayer.

A teaching activity flips the order. The class does something first, and the doing itself surfaces the principle before you ever name it. Then you debrief, and the debrief is where the principle gets named out loud, in the class's own words if possible, not just yours.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because most of us default to decorating. It is easier. Teaching activities take more setup, because you have to design the doing so it actually produces the insight. But the payoff is that people remember what they discover more than what they are told, and that is not a preference, it is just how learning works for most of us.

The Debrief Is the Bridge

If the activity is the teaching moment, the debrief is the bridge from that moment to the doctrine. Skip the debrief and you have a fun ten minutes that evaporates. The debrief does not need to be long. Two or three questions is enough:

• What did you notice while we were doing that?
• Why do you think it worked out that way?
• How does that connect to what we read this week in the week's scripture block?

The order matters. Ask what happened before you ask what it means. If you jump straight to "what does this teach us about faith," you are back to decorating, because you are handing them the answer inside the question.

Age-Banded Examples

The right activity changes a lot by age, not just in complexity but in what kind of thinking the class is even capable of. A Sunbeam cannot debate a case study. A Gospel Doctrine class does not need body motions. Here is what that looks like at each stage, using real weeks from the 2026 Old Testament schedule.

Sunbeam and CTR: Body Motions

For our youngest Primary kids, ages 3-7, the activity has to live in their bodies, not in discussion. Words are still slippery for them, but motion sticks.

Take the week on Elijah the Prophet, where the fire falls on Elijah's altar on Mount Carmel. Instead of explaining what happened, have the children act it out: build a pretend altar with their hands, "pour water" over it three times, then all shout together and throw their arms up like the fire coming down. The motion is the content. When you ask afterward "who sent the fire," they already know the answer because their bodies just performed it. That is the whole lesson for this age: God answered Elijah's prayer, and the children felt the shape of that answer instead of just hearing it described.

This is the kind of activity our Primary lesson plans are built to include automatically, sized to a 20-minute class and matched to the actual week's story rather than a generic craft.

Valiant: Cooperative Scripture Look-Ups

By Valiant age, roughly 8-11, kids can read and can work in pairs, but they still do better with a task than an open discussion. Cooperative look-ups work well here: split the class into pairs, give each pair one verse reference and one question, and have them report back what they found.

For the week on David and Goliath, you might give one pair 1 Samuel 17:45 and ask "what does David say he is trusting in instead of a sword," another pair 1 Samuel 17:37 and ask "what has David already survived before he faced Goliath," and so on. Nobody has to talk in front of the whole class about their own faith, they just report what the verse says. When you put the pieces back together, the class has built the principle themselves, verse by verse, that David's confidence came from remembering what God had already done for him.

Youth: Scenario Cards

Teenagers can handle ambiguity, and honestly they will disengage fast if you hand them something too simple. Scenario cards work well for Youth Sunday School: a short, realistic situation printed on a card, with a question at the bottom, worked through in small groups before the whole class discusses it.

For a week on obedience and agency, a scenario card might read: "A friend asks you to cover for them about where they were last weekend. It's not a big lie, and refusing might cost the friendship. What do you do, and why?" Youth do not want to be told the answer to something like that. They want to wrestle with it, in a small group where it feels safer to be honest, and then bring their thinking to the larger class. The scripture context frames the discussion, but the scenario is what makes it feel real instead of hypothetical.

Adults: Case Studies

For Sunday School, Elders Quorum and Relief Society, and Gospel Principles classes, a case study can do what a lecture cannot: it puts a real-feeling situation on the table and lets the class apply doctrine to it instead of just discussing doctrine in the abstract.

For the week on Kings Who Trusted the Lord, a case study might describe two people, one who prayed and then acted, and one who prayed and then waited for a sign before acting at all, and ask the class which approach the scripture block seems to favor and why. Adults are often more willing to disagree with each other than teenagers are, so a well-built case study can generate real discussion instead of the polite silence that follows "does anyone have any thoughts."

When the Resource Center Fails You

Every teacher eventually shows up to find the copier out of toner, the printer at home jammed, or the resource center locked for a stake activity. Activities built around printed cards should always have a no-prep fallback that needs nothing but you and the room.

• Turn the look-up activity into an oral one. Assign verses out loud, have people find them in their own scriptures, and report verbally instead of writing on a card.
• Turn scenario cards into a spoken prompt. Read the scenario out loud, twice, and let small groups discuss it without anything on paper.
• Turn body motions into a call and response. You do not need props for Sunbeam kids to act out Mount Carmel, your voice and their bodies are enough.
• Keep one index card in your scripture case with three generic debrief questions on it: what did we notice, why did it happen that way, what does that teach us about God. That covers you for almost any activity you cannot fully execute as planned.

The activity is a vehicle for the thinking, not the thinking itself. If the vehicle breaks down, you can still get the class to the same place with fewer materials and a little more of your own voice carrying it.

How the Cards Actually Get Written

When you generate a lesson at ComeFollowMe.io, the app builds printable activity cards as part of the lesson, matched to the calling and age group you select and the actual week's scripture block, not a generic template. For a Primary class it writes body-motion or look-up prompts sized to the class's reading level. For youth it writes scenario cards with a real dilemma and a debrief question already attached. For adult classes it writes case studies that tie back to the week's principle, plus the 5-8 discussion questions, a timed flow for however long your class runs, and a take-home challenge, so the card is never the whole lesson, just one well-built piece of it.

You still decide what the activity should teach before class starts, because that is a call only you can make about your class. But you do not have to invent the card from scratch every week, or guess whether the motion or scenario actually lines up with the doctrine. If you want to see what that looks like for your own calling and this week's block, you can generate a lesson and look at the activity section it builds for free, no card required beyond what you already have on hand.

Whatever activity you land on, the test stays the same. If the class could name the principle in their own words after the doing and before you say anything, it worked. If they can only repeat it back because you told them, it was decoration, and next week is a good time to try flipping the order.