A House of Order

It's Spring Cleaning time and while I was making a list of things I wanted to do this scripture came into my head:

D&C 88:119

Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God;

So I thought it would be fun to do a family home evening on each of those areas (faith, learning, prayer, order, and glory). And of course since I'm in the spring cleaning mode, I thought we'd start with "a house of order." 

Song: "When we're helping we're Happy". (Children's Songbook p 198)

We read the D&C scripture above. Then we talked about how it's important that we all work together in the house. 

We read Mosiah 4:14-15 and talked about how it's Mom and Dad's job to make sure we are teaching the kids about doing the right and it's the kids' job to help Mom and Dad. 

Talk about family rules and goals. I found this on the LDS website and liked it:

Family Goals	Family Rules
We want to be a loving family.	We will all try to attend any event in which one of our family members is involved to show our support.
We want to be a healthy family.	We will obey the Word of Wisdom.
We want to be active in the Church.	We will all attend sacrament meeting together. We will accept Church callings when asked.
We want to be alert at school and work.	We will always be home by ten o’clock on school nights.
We want to be morally clean.	We will not date until we are sixteen. We will not do anything that will lead to immorality.
We want to develop our individual talents.	We will practice one hour each day.
We want to be kind.	There will be no quarreling in our house.
We want to be together as a family in eternity.	We will have family home evening every week. We will plan to be married in the temple and keep the commandments.

Then for the activity (this is more of a craft but I justified it being a part of FHE) we painted clipboards that we are going to hang up on the wall that will hold our schedules and chore charts I'm printing out.

So the plan is to do another area next week and I hope we can keep this up cause I like having a topic picked for me :)

Lehi's Dream

The other night we were reading about Lehi's Dream, so we decided to do a Family Home Evening about what holding to the rod means.  Jared had a key chain little iron rod that we got at Deseret Book a while ago.  We turned off all the lights, and told Paul we wanted him to get from our bedroom to the living room couch (where I was) by himself.  (We made sure there was nothing for him to trip on .;-) ) Once he got to the couch, Jared had him hold on to "The Iron Rod" and guided him around our dark house, to where I was waiting with an apple.  After he had a bit of apple, we talked about how much easier it was to find mom when he was holding on to the iron rod.  It was simple, but memorable for the boy, and he wanted to have dad guide him around the rest of the night.
P.S. I can't take credit for this, it was all Jared's idea.

Another conference resource

conferencegames.lds.org is another great resource for kids for FHE.  There are coloring pages and online games.  We have been playing the matching game this whole week to reinforce our las weeks FHE.

Getting Ready for Conference

We are using these last few FHE's before conference to prepare!  I found this game today to start teaching her the names of the apostles and prophets.

http://lds.about.com/od/familyhomeeveninggames/a/fhe_apostlecard.htm

A year of FHE

I thought this was awesome. It's a year of FHE lessons that correspond to what was talked about in primary that week! http://www.sugardoodle.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8492

Real meaning of Christmas

I'm not sure any of our kids are old enough to have the issue of focusing on Santa, but I wanted to remember this idea for later. http://www.latter-dayhomeschooling.com/2010/12/symbols-of-christmas.html

The Christmas Story

For Family Home Evening on Monday, we took a nativity set and put all the pieces on the floor next to the table where we would be setting it up.

We talked Jocelyn through the Christmas story and as we did it, she found the pieces of the set that related to that part of the story and set them up for us.

Not only did she think it was so fun that she wanted to do it 4 times (and everyday since), but she is learning the story really well now.

Song: When Joseph Went to Bethlehem