FHE: Easter

I got this idea from here.  Though I've edited their stuff slightly to remove the weird symbols that appear there.

This Easter Egg Hunt/Easter story went over very very well.  My 3-year old loves finding eggs, and after it was over wanted to hide them, find them, and go through the Easter story again. :)

I started out reading the scriptures, but stopped halfway through because they just weren't helpful for my young audience (3 &1yr) and they lost interest listening to them.

I hid an extra egg for each child with a treat in it and we opened those very last and enjoyed our treat :)

Will do this again for sure.

Note:  for the perfume one, I used a tissue instead of a cloth and when we asked my 3 year old what was inside he said "a booger wiper!"  So maybe I should have used fabric...  I made a cross with trimmed toothpicks (so they'd fit in the egg) and thread and that worked pretty well.  I also cut out a fake leaf from felt.  I'm hoping to maybe reuse some of these props year after year.

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.

FHE: Plan of Salvation

I just finished making the printouts for this weeks lesson.  We're going to go on a "journey" through the Plan of Salvation by following yarn through the house to different places along the plan- Pre-mortal Existence, Earth, Spirit Prison/Paradise, Judgement, and the 3 Kingdoms of Glory.  I will probably hang the signs in each room for the kids to find.  We will of course end up in the Celestial Kingdom (the kitchen) and have a treat, but alternatively, you could color the pictures you found and review. :)

update: This was a great success!  My 3 year-old even said to me later in the week how much fun he had following the string.  Also, while we ate our "celestial cookie" I laid out the pictures from each room and asked him to tell me which one was first, next etc. and I was surprised that he was able to choose them all in the right order! :)

FHE: What Is My Spirit?

Last week we just talked about how we existed before we came to Earth as spirits, where we lived with our Heavenly Father- the father of our spirits.  When we came to Earth we got bodies (from our "earthly parents") and when we die, our spirits will leave our bodies to be with Heavenly Father until the resurrection, where we get our bodies in their perfected forms.  Then we all had a puppet (ours happen to be lizards and turtles) and we had our hands be spirits and when our hands went inside the puppets they got bodies, and then they'd leave again when they died, but our hands could still talk to each other without the bodies :)