Primary Newsletter Design

A few months ago I was called to serve as the secretary in my ward's primary. If you're not a member of the LDS faith, that was a whole mess of gobledegook to you.

Ward - congregation of people within a particular geographical area
Primary - organization for Children 1.5 - 11 years old

One of my duties as secretary is to design and distribute a monthly newsletter with assignments for the children; information on that month's theme, scripture, and song; birthday's; activity schedules; etc.

I've had quite a time getting into the swing of these newsletters, sometimes they'd take me more than 10 hours to put together! Originally I wanted it to look 'clean' and professional, but then I realized that this is for kids and decided to spice it up a little bit. I think I've got a pretty decent format going right now and wanted to share it with all of you.

It was designed in google docs, and if any of you have played around in there, you know that some times things can be a little bit frustrating. A few things to point out if you'd like to use the document so you're not pulling your hair out:

1. Tables in Google Docs require a 'carriage return' (enter) before and after them.
2. The doc uses tables within tables, so if you're getting confused as to which table you're in, set all of the borders to a solid black line so you can get an idea of what you're working with.
3. The headers and footers drive me bonkers, too, so if you figure them out let me know.
4. The 'August' at the top is an image that you can replace with text. I happened to receive some cute month lettering that I got to utilize here recently, but you don't have to use an image.

You can make a copy and start editing it up here!

If you're interested in knowing how we track who has participated in opening exercises, I can probably share a template for that as well, though I have to be honest and admit that the original idea wasn't mine.

Good luck to all you hard working newsletter makers out there! Cheers!