FHE: General Conference

Since general conference is this weekend, I wanted to prep the kids for what it actually is- which I was surprised to find that my 3-year-old son did.  (They must have talked about it in Sunbeams yesterday?)
Then we talked about one of the earliest "general conferences" we know of- King Benjamin's address in the Book of Mormon (Words of Mormon and early Mosiah).  (There is a good picture of King Benjamin in the Gospel Art Book that we looked at pg 74.)
I, of course, had to build a "fort" (two chairs with a blanket over) and we all huddled in there around the kids' illustrated Book of Mormon Stories and briefly went over the things King Benjamin talked about.
We talked about why the people were in tents, and the difference between conference back then (no TV, microphones, he was the only speaker, etc) and now and how lucky we are to hear the prophet speak so easily.
At the end I asked if they could remember King Benjamin's name, and where the people sat when they listened to him.  I also asked if they could remember our prophet's name (which they couldn't) and we practiced saying it a couple of times.

I think it went over fairly well- once we got over the excitement of having a tent.  It admittedly took a bit of time to get my son to calm down about that.

FHE: Nephi Builds a Boat "Puppet Show"

We started family daily scripture study in the mornings (just 3 verses a day) and we just got to the point where Nephi starts building a boat.  I saw this FHE lesson and thought it would be very relevant and maybe help make the story seem more familiar as we read it.

I pretty much followed this exactly, hiding behind a chair and holding up the cut out puppets as I told it.

My kids had a hard time paying attention to it, and next time I wouldn't read anything and try to make it more of a dialogue (having dad chime in with some kind of voice of God).  They did enjoy taking turns giving their own puppet shows after mine, though.  (my 18-mo-old just stood behind the chair and kept saying "hi!" with Nephi. It was pretty funny)

Not sure how much they got out of it, but we did it :)

FHE: The Prophet

I thought since conference is coming up in a few weeks, it might be good to make sure our kids knew who the prophet is and what a prophet is.

I have a cute "popsicle stick puzzle" my neighbor made at a busy-bag swap where she cut a picture of President Monson into strips and modge podged them onto tongue depressors, and then you can line them up as a sort of puzzle.  Great quiet church activity that fits into a snack bag and doesn't have too many pieces!  BUT, you could always print a picture of the prophet and just cut it up into pieces.

I would ask a question about prophets (who is our prophet now, what does a prophet do, why do we need one, which prophet restored the gospel, can you name any other prophets from the scriptures...) and as we answered them, we put one popsicle stick down to complete the picture.  You might ask "who is our prophet now?" last so you can show them the completed picture.

I think it went pretty well.  My 3-year-old son wanted to put the puzzle together again after :)

FHE: Healthy Food and Exercise

This week I'm pretty much planning to use this lesson.  Everyone will get a present from Heavenly Father that they will open with a picture of them inside- their body.  We'll talk about healthy eating, (using these pictures) what different food groups do for our body, and why we need exercise to stay healthy.  We will probably just eat oranges for a treat since I bought a hug box of them recently and we need to eat them :)

update: For some reason, if you try to print the images in google docs, it tries to make you do it in portrait and shrink the images to fit.  If you go to file>download and then print from your computer, it should work.  It's fine the other way too, the images will just be slightly smaller.