Family Home Evening

I just want to start off with sharing a quote from a conference talk from Elder Bednar that I believe he gave last April. This sums up how I feel a good majority of the time about family home evening. 

"Sometimes Sister Bednar and I wondered if our efforts to do these spiritually essential things were worthwhile. Now and then verses of scripture were read amid outbursts such as “He’s touching me!” “Make him stop looking at me!” “Mom, he’s breathing my air!” Sincere prayers occasionally were interrupted with giggling and poking. And with active, rambunctious boys, family home evening lessons did not always produce high levels of edification. At times Sister Bednar and I were exasperated because the righteous habits we worked so hard to foster did not seem to yield immediately the spiritual results we wanted and expected."

"Today if you could ask our adult sons what they remember about family prayer, scripture study, and family home evening, I believe I know how they would answer. They likely would not identify a particular prayer or a specific instance of scripture study or an especially meaningful family home evening lesson as the defining moment in their spiritual development. What they would say they remember is that as a family we were consistent."

I'm not one to say that consistency is a strong point of mine. In fact, I struggle with it often. But I can say that FHE is something that makes trying to be consistent a bit easier. Just like Paula said in her post, FHE can be short, simple, and still very effective. Most of us have seen the FHE boards where each person in the family has an assignment. Opening song, opening prayer, lesson, scripture, activity, treat, closing song, and closing prayer. With little ones in the home, all of those things aren't necessarily the easiest to do with short attention spans! What has worked for us is an opening and closing song, an opening and closing prayer, and a spiritual thought that usually uses some sort of object lesson or activity. Depending on how prepared we are, sometimes it takes 5-7 minutes and sometimes it takes 30 minutes. Sometimes we have FHE at the dinner table as soon as we're done eating (since we're already gathered there) and sometimes we have it in the living room. 

I think that there are two essentials for FHE when you have toddlers at home. First is the Nursery manual, which can be accessed online here, and second is Book of Mormon Stories, which can be purchased here. My almost 3 year old brings home a picture from Nursery each week which tells me what lesson they've learned. I try to follow up and have that lesson on Sunday to revisit what he learned the day before. When all else fails and we don't have a lesson, we have the Book of Mormon Stories to read as a family. My son loves the pictures and they are short and concise stories that summarize the Book of Mormon.

There are weeks, though, when my husband and I look at each other while we're eating and ask "who was supposed to plan FHE tonight?" Then "oops" is written all over both of our faces and we quickly pull something out of a hat. We're lucky that our kids are so young right now because it's easy to mask our unpreparedness! 

Last week we did a quick lesson on eternal families that I thought I'd share. I keep a few paper grocery bags on hand just in case I need to run dinner over to a family or bring them something in a bag that I don't need back. I pulled one of them out along with some puff paints and we decided to make a family picture. Matthew LOVES to paint, so while we were talking about eternal families he paid full attention! He knew that what I was saying was having to do with the activity that he was so excited to do and he was listening so attentively. After we talked about our family and how special it is, we all chose a color of paint and put our handprints on our picture.

 As you can see, my little guy sure did love it!

Another idea I had was to draw a picture of everyone in our family and we talked about how we love our family. Both kids enjoyed coloring the picture.










I put both pictures up on our wall in the kitchen so that we could see them every day. Maybe we will have a collection of them soon! The brown bag activities have been a hit so far.

Short, Simple, but Effective

As my brother once said, Family Home Evening is important, but it doesn’t need to be a big deal. Even if you just sing a song, say a prayer, read a scripture, and then eat a cookie! What’s important is the time together as a family.

My kids won’t sit still for long enough to have a “traditional” family home evening. At their age, they need something to keep them in their seats. Thus, we have family home evening in conjunction with dinner. We always have dinner at the table, and it’s the longest stretch that they will sit in one place. So for the time being, it’s the perfect time to teach them a lesson J Lately, we’ve been teaching the “basic” scripture stories, like Daniel and the Lion’s Den, David and Goliath, etc. We’ve also used Behold, Your Little Ones. If you don’t have this, I highly recommend it! It’s a great resource for teaching preschool aged children about the gospel, and even review the lessons they learned in Nursery.

I find in our family it’s very important to have the gospel teachings in the home, especially since our family has and will continue to move around a lot, and what each ward presents is sometimes different than we would teach it.

Family Home Evening, eh?

There are a couple of things I have done in the past as separate activities, but could be done together or separate.

Numero 1:
This was done as a married couple with no children, but can be modified to work with kids too. (Oh dear, my Special Ed training is showing).

Wes (my better half) came up with the idea. We each gave each other a topic. Our job was to take our topic and tell the other what it was, why it was important, and do it like we were talking to someone who knew nothing of the church. We wrote down thoughts, then talked. My topic was visiting teaching and his was the priesthood. I liked it because it made you think what you really thought about that topic and why it was important to you. We've repeated that one several times.

Modifications: For doing this with young children, you could give them a topic and have them draw, write, say, what they believe about it or state their understanding. Unfortunately, this is probably better for older kids than most of us have. It would be beyond my almost 1 year old for sure, but I thought I'd share one of my favorites.

Numero 2:
This one, fortunately, is family friendly but probably takes more time. I love the days when a holiday falls on a Monday, like Columbus day. We took the opportunity to go on a family hike. I love being outdoors and being outdoors together is awesome. My perfect idea for family time: a family walk or hike.

Topic: Oct. 17 week

Well, no one has volunteered a topic for this week, so here’s another one of mine J

What ways do you have family home evening with your little ones?

(This should apply to all who want to participate. I know no one is perfect in this area, and maybe you don’t even do it every week. Even if you’ve only done it once that went well, tell about that J You may be helping someone in a similar situation see options they never thought of before. And that’s the purpose of this blog. J )