It takes a heap of singing and storytelling, puppets and pageantry, Scripture Jeopardy, Bible Bingo and Prophet Puzzles and birthday banners, plus reams of colored paper, thousands of kid-sized scissors and gallons of salt dough to raise a righteous generation of Mormon youth.
Symbolic names help, too. Trailbuilders, Blazers, Trekkers and Guide Patrol for the boys. Seagulls, Bluebirds, Firelights, Gaynotes, Merrimisses and Homebuilders for the girls. Don't forget bandeloes (those uniquely Mormon flannel sashes with glued-on badges) and CTR (choose the right) rings.
This is the stuff of Primary, the LDS Church's organization for children between 3 and 11 years old.
It began on Aug. 25, 1878, when Aurelia Rogers gathered 224 children at a stone church in Farmington. Now The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints counts more than a million youngsters in 160 nations as members of its Primary organization.
Today, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley will address those children age 7 and older in what has been deemed an unprecedented satellite broadcast to commemorate the Primary's 125th anniversary. The hourlong service, beginning at 2 p.m., will be broadcast from the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City in 22 languages to chapels in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America. The meeting will be rebroadcast on Feb. 15 via satellite to Brazil, Europe, South Africa and parts of Uruguay.
The technology may be all 21st century, but the goals are not too different from Primary's original purposes.
The impetus in 1878 was to domesticate unruly Mormon boys, said Elder David B. Haight, the oldest member of the church's Quorum of Twelve Apostles, in an interview.
The girls were being taught to be young ladies while working in the kitchen with Mama, but the boys were out with their fathers "riding horses and chasing Indians," he said.
"The leaders wanted to know who would their sweet young daughters marry if those boys grew up to be ruffians?" said Haight, who should know.
He heard it from his grandmother, Louisa Leavitt Haight, who was Rogers' counselor in the first Primary presidency. Together they decided to "sit those boys down in church with the girls and teach them to sing, memorize and read the Scriptures and become gentlemen," Haight said.
Each Wednesday afternoon children learned obedience, faith in God, prayer, punctuality and good manners. Some LDS wards organized the children into bands and choruses, while others sponsored newspapers written and edited by the children. There were dances and talent shows and picnics and plays, wrote Carol Cornwall Madsen and Susan Staker Oman in Sisters and Little Saints: One Hundred Years of Primary.
"I'm 96 years old and that was a long time ago," says Haight, who attended Primary classes in Oakley, Idaho. "I just remember it was fun to get together with other children and have a good teacher and learn to sing and play games and do things with your hands, probably dance the Virginia Reel with your feet."
Girls were encouraged to choose a flower as their own personal symbol.
Lt. Gov. Olene Walker, who went to Primary in rural Ogden, wanted the rose, but her mother discouraged her, saying that everyone would pick it.
"So I picked a nasturtium, a bright orange flower with edible leaves," Walker said Friday, laughing. "I could hardly say it or spell it, so I chose it."
But the children also were expected to work and in the 1930s came the biggest project of all -- a children's hospital, first in a Salt Lake City home, and, in 1952, its own building on 11th Avenue.
What would eventually become the Primary Children's Hospital was funded almost entirely by the children and other interested donors (including non-Mormons), not by general church funds.
Thomas S. Monson, first counselor in the First Presidency, remembers anticipating a place where skilled physicians could mend broken limbs and treat sick children.
Every ward in the church had a cardboard replica of the hospital that also served as a piggy bank. It became the tradition for the children to give their birthday pennies, two for each year.
Each Wednesday, these children of the Great Depression would deposit their pennies in the bank while singing, "Give said the little stream . . . there is something all can give," Monson wrote in a 1994 essay about his memories of Primary.
One day little Tommy Monson had a dime and a penny in his pocket. He showed them to his friend, Jack, and then suggested that they put the penny in the bank and then go out for five-cent fudgesicles.
After depositing their coins in the bank, sly Jack asked to see the coins again. When Tommy reached in his pocket and found only a penny, he realized his friend had switched the coins and put the dime in the bank.
"For a long while I felt that I, perhaps, had the most substantial investment in the Primary Children's Hospital," Monson wrote, "more so than any boy in the entire ward."