Our Promise-God's Promise

This lesson was advanced for the kids, but it had a good message for Ryan and I, and we were able to discuss with the kids the importance of keeping promises.

I found a bunch of different principles that we keep, and the promises that God makes to us that go along with each principle. I didn't keep the scripture references for each, unfortunately. I wrote corresponding numbers on both God's promise and our promise. I then let the kids pick a slip of paper and tape it to the page, and then we took the corresponding slip and taped it under the correct heading, either God's Promise or Our Promise. The following is the list that we used just in case you can't read the image that well. The top number is God's promise, and the bottom is our promise.

1. Forgive our sins

1. Confess and forsake

2. Open the windows of heaven

2. Pay tithing

3. Holy Ghost as constant companion

3. Have virtuous thoughts

4. Be unspotted from the world

4. Keep the sabbath day holy

5. Receive divine guidance and inspiration

5. Study the scriptures

6. Find great treasures of knowledge

6. Keep the word of wisdom

7. Undo our heavy burdens

7. Fast

8. Fullness and a continuation of our seed

8. Make and keep temple covenants

Tithing

I found a true story in "The Friend" about tithing. There are many stories you could find or just make up your own. This one happened to be about a little boy that had shoes that were worn out. His mother had enough money to either pay tithing or buy him new shoes. She decided she better walk the money down to the Bishop's house right then to pay him the tithing. On her way home a neighbor came to the fence and said that she had been meaning to give some shoes to this woman for a long time and handed her a a pair of shoes that were just the right size for her son.

I told this story to the kids and then had them watch as I filled out our tithing slip and count out the cash to put in the envelope. I also had money that week for Fast Offering so I quickly explained what that was to them.

We then each went and found a pair of shoes from the closet (just to remember the story) and put them in the center of the room in a pile. We turned off all the lights (this was in our bedroom with our black out blind so it worked really well), and we had them try and find their own pair of shoes with the light out. Kids love this kind of stuff, and we got a big kick out of it when we realized Ava had picked her shoes that have lights on the soles. Ryan and I each had one of each other's shoes. This was a good chance for us to laugh and just have a simple activity to somehow go along with the lesson on the "Tithing Shoes."

3 Fun Favorites

My kids love doing this for F.H.E.

The first thing we do is each person (parents included) gets to pretend they are an animal. We go around the circle doing that for awhile and guessing.

The second we do is act out scripture stories. We divide our two girls up (our baby is still too young to participate in F.H.E) between parents and let them pick a scripture story they can act out, then the other group guesses what is being acted out. Some of their favorites are baby Moses, Mary and Joseph, Jonah in the whale, etc....

The third thing we do is a continuing story. The first person starts the story and then points to someone to continue and it goes from there. When it gets back to mom or dad we usually try and take the story in a positive way and have a value or something we are trying to teach with it. This is fun and creative for the kids.

My kids LOVE doing this. They absolutely love this F.H.E when we do these three simple activities.

The Good Samaritan

We chose to do this on "The Good Samaritan" but really you can do this with any scripture story. I had a cute little children's book called 'The Good Samaritan," which is why I chose to do it on this. We read the book to them, and then talked about being kind to others. We then had them draw a story of the picture with shaving cream. We decided to spray it on cookie sheets. The only thing I would do different is have the kids do this in their undies or swimsuit, because they got too much of it on their clothes.

Respecting Our Earth

We went up the canyon and brought a picture of the earth with us. We also brought latex gloves, two Walmart sacks, and ice cream (optional). We asked the kids "Who created the earth?" and talked to them about how Heavenly Father wants us to keep his earth clean.

We then went around the camp spot that we had parked at and picked up two bags worth of trash.

They really enjoyed getting out and doing this activity. Not to mention the ice cream we ate as dessert.

Manners

Ryan and I have talked a lot about teaching our kids manners. Not just please and thank you, but ones that don't just come naturally to kids. We decided to have a F.H.E on manners.

This was a really simple activity, but our kids really enjoyed it. We sat them down and talked to them about manners that we think our important in our family. I think every family has certain things they expect as far as manners go from their children. One thing that we think is important is looking people in the eye and speaking loudly enough for that person to hear. We talked about other things as well such as:

1. Ringing the door bell only once and waiting for a bit before ringing it again. (our neighbor is a doorbell ringing nut, and does it 5 times before we can get to the door, so we decided to teach our kids that that isn't exactly polite).

2. Asking to use the bathroom at the neighbors instead of just going ahead and using it.

3. Of course please, thank you, I'm sorry, you're welcome etc.....

4. Not staring at others.

5. Holding the door for others.

There are MANY more you could come up with, but those are a few we talked about. We then played a game. I had the kids stand against the wall and I sat on the opposite side of the room. I would say something like "If this is good manners take 3 steps forward. You ring the doorbell once, and then wait a minute before ringing it again." Then they would take three steps forward. "If this is good manners take 1 step forward. When somebody says "hi" to you you look down at the floor and mumble "hi". They stayed in their spot, because they knew that wasn't good manners. They LOVED this game! I then let them make up the scenarios for us and we took the steps. You could get really creative with it and have them jump like a frog instead of just stepping as well.

It was really fun. I think we are going to do this F.H.E about every three months just as a refresher. If we see something they can work on as far as manners go we will add it to future lessons.

Modern Day Commandments

We took the most recent conference Ensign and picked three different "commandments" that had come from our modern day prophets. We picked 1. Modesty 2. Being Happy 3. Pray Always. We thought these three "commandments" were ones that our kids could identify with at their age. We then looked through 'The Friend' magazine, and had them find a picture that they thought represented the three "commandments" we had picked.

When we started the lesson, we showed the kids a picture of Moses, and talked to them about the Ten Commandments; how Moses was a prophet and we have prophets on the earth today that still receive commandments from God. We told them that "Thou shalt" is a way of saying that it is important and we need to do it. That way they can be familiar with "scripture talk."

We displayed this picture in a place of their choice to remember our lesson.