What to Teach and Learn from Samuel?

I'm teaching a lesson about Samuel, the Boy Prophet in Primary next Sunday, and I'm not sure what all to say in this lesson.

I'm not sure exactly how important Samuel's parents are to his story. Sure, they promised him to the Lord and there's a whole story there, but telling that story doesn't do much to accomplish the stated purpose of this lesson: "To encourage the children to listen for the promptings of the Holy Ghost." I suppose I can tell the children to listen to the Holy Ghost after we ask for things, so the Holy Ghost can give us some idea whether we'll receive the blessing or not and/or what we have to do in order to secure those blessings. But this message is slightly undercut by the fact that, when Hannah was told that she would have the son she was praying for, the person who told her was Eli, the Prophet. Had Hannah's answer come through the Holy Ghost, as it could have, that would make her story relate much better to the rest of the lesson. If I don't mention Samuel's parents, I could easily bypass them by simply saying that Samuel was being raised by Eli. There's no real need to mention how Samuel got there.

However, if I include only the story of Samuel himself, the lesson will be very short. There'll be a brief introduction of our main character, maybe spending a few minutes to establish that he was righteous, and then we can read through the part where the Lord calls him repeatedly, but Samuel mistakes the voice as coming from Eli (There might be a lesson there: Say things that God would say, the way God would say them. Be so civil and truthful that, if someone heard the voice of God, they might mistake it for yours.) until eventually Eli tells Samuel that the voice is coming from God, and Samuel makes the effort to actively listen. It's not a very long or complex story.

Naturally, I can pad the lesson time by developing the morals of the story. What might have happened if Samuel ignored the voice after the first few times? How can we recognize a voice as coming from the Lord? What should we do when we receive messages from God? Messages like that can help us fill the remaining time in the lesson and leave the children with a message that might help them better people, including being better at recognizing and hollowing the Spirit, which to me seems far more important than knowing who Samuel's parents are.

This is going to be an interesting lesson. The story itself is somewhat lacking, but the lessons we can learn from it and the topics it introduces are worth unpacking and exploring at some length. I'll have to do some more studying and decide how much of the lesson material I'm going to cover and how I'll branch out from it. I want to make sure I give the moral of the story an adequate amount of time, and that'll probably mean spending less time with the story itself. Thankfully, I have plenty of time to study this out and make these decisions. I'm just glad I started thinking about this now, while I still have time.