Small endeavors

Because I don't already have enough on my plate, I decided to take up a little pet project. We've struggled over the last 3 1/2 years or so with what to do for Family Home Evening lessons. Once a week, on Monday nights, Family Home Evening is supposed to be an opportunity to teach gospel principles in our home, talk with our family about, well, things that affect our family, and participate in activities together.

But finding lesson ideas for toddlers is really difficult. Finding ideas for 3 small boys is next to impossible. People forget that the attention span of a 2 year old is about 5 minutes, if you're lucky. Two years back they came out with the new Sunday manual for nursery, which could double as lessons for Family Home Evening, but I found it still wasn't right for us.

This past month, however, we finally found our answer. This year at church the kids have learned a song called "Follow the Prophet," where each verse teaches about a different Old Testament prophet. The song is upbeat, fun, repetitive, and easy to learn even for the little ones. Then, one Sunday while playing the song for the umpteenth time, it suddenly occurred to me that the kids could learn more than the standard first 3 verses. There are 9 verses, and each one told a different story. So I set out to plan 9 Family Home Evening lessons based on each of the 9 verses. Each week we learned a new verse, read a story about that prophet and then did a short activity to help the boys remember the story. It met with such success I felt I had to share with other parents out there. Surely I am not the first mother of young children at a loss for what to teach on Monday nights.

So I started a website! I started with that first series, but I've already written and posted a second one as well, based on the song "Book of Mormon Stories" (based on the 8 verse song of different stories from the Book of Mormon). I have a couple more ideas already brewing, and I hope to just keep adding to it! I hope this will be a great resource for others as well, as they look to start an important tradition in their new, young families.

Here's the link:
http://fhein5.webs.com/