Since we started using this chart, we have made a change. Whoever is on scripture is allowed to either share a scripture or bear their testimony. It's been a wonderful thing and it has really helped us to consistently do family home evening. I know that I still have plenty of room for improvement in the quality of our FHE. Now that we are pretty solidly consistent (it helps that the girls actually really love to do family home evening and they are very upset if we miss), I know that I need to be spending a lot more time planning and preparing for FHE. I'm still pulling things together on Monday afternoon without really any advance preparation. Ideally, Daren and I would pray together to see what the topics of FHE would be and we would help our children plan their lessons so they could develop that skill for future church callings.
This Monday was a wonderful family home evening that I wanted to share for our blog book. Kelsey was conducting this week. She doesn't really like that spot. Her favorite is to choose songs and she thinks she should get to do that every week and gets a little mad when someone picks something else besides "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam." So she was a little grouchy and I ended up conducting. Daren was in charge of songs and our opening hymn was "Choose the Right." Then I shared a scripture: Mosiah 2:17 and we briefly talked about how serving others is serving God because those we are serving are His children and that makes Him happy. And also how the opposite is true-when we hurt others we are hurting Him, even if the 'others' are our sisters! :)
After that we had a wonderful lesson. This lesson was special. It was prepared without any parental guidance. It came from a story found in the magazine, "Horse Illustrated." Have you figured out who was in charge of lesson yet? :) Natalee did a very good job. She started by asking Daren to read a story about a girl who was struggling with her badly-behaved horse and she was ready to give up but she took her to a training stable and learned so many things. Her horse improved a lot and she also learned about her own interests and abilities and she grew a lot in a lot of areas. Then Natalee asked us, "What did you learn from this story?" Daren said he was interested to see how this was going to tie into the gospel. Natalee explained, "Just as her learning grew, that is like how our testimonies grow every time we are nice to somebody. She had done a wonderful job preparing and she had made each of the girls a little piece of paper with small dashes on them. She handed them out and told them that every time this week they did something nice for someone, they could draw a small circle (not a large one!) on the end of one of their dashes. The goal was to get all of the dashes filled up by the end of the week. Then she asked if we would give them a special reward (donuts or ice cream or something like that) if they got all their dashes filled in. The girls were very excited to get their papers and were being very nice to each other after school today. They each earned some circles to put on their dashes!
After the lesson, Haylee selected a game of "I Spy" for the activity and we ate some yellow, circle, lemon cookies that Mackenzie chose for dessert. Even when it isn't perfect or perfectly prepared, family home evening does bring us closer together.
Natalee's Testimony/Kindness Chart
2 comments:
That's great!Natalee did such a good job, you are great parents!
That is such a good idea (testimony or scripture)! You're FHE chart looks amazing!!
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