FHE: Missionaries

I was inspired by this FHE idea, and was particularly excited by the badges you can print out at home at the bottom of the post.  Since we are feeding the missionaries on Wednesday night, I thought it might be a fitting topic to talk about who missionaries are and what they do.

We started by asking my 3 and 1-year olds (really mostly my 3-year old son) if he knows what a missionary is.  "Yes," he replies.  "What do they do?" I asked a bit surprised.  "They mish," he says.

ah.

I showed a picture of Jesus and asked if everyone knew who that was and told them that not everybody knows who Jesus is and so that's why we have missionaries- to teach the world about Jesus, because knowing about Jesus makes us happy and we want everyone to be happy.
I asked my two kids if they want to be missionaries, and they both said yes (luckily) and so I pulled out my badges I had printed out and pinned them to their shirts.  (which my daughter promptly made me take off.. haha)
We also talked about the importance of the Book of Mormon and how our church is the only one that knows about it and so we want to share this additional testament of Jesus with people who already know about Jesus too.
We mentioned that if you want to be a missionary, you need to know all about Jesus and the Book of Mormon so you will be able to teach others about them, so it's important that we keep reading the Book of Mormon and other scriptures every day.
We also talked about other things missionaries sometimes do, besides teach the gospel, such as service, teaching English, teaching music (my mom taught piano on a recent mission in Chile, which we mentioned), etc.

By the end, everyone was quite rowdy and so we gave up and had some ice cream.

FHE: House Rules

I've been having a bit of a rough bout with my 3-year-old following the rules and so I thought that maybe if we talked about them together and picked 3-5 all-encompassing house rules that HE helped us pick out, maybe I could get better cooperation?

We talked about why there are rules in any setting (a classroom, at home, the law) and that they are meant to protect us.

After much discussion- i.e. us telling a short story about a negative scenario that happens in our house all the time, where my son would end up unhappy, and then we would think of a rule to protect him from this happening again.
These are the rules we came up with. (and I wrote these out on a large piece of paper with stick-figure images to help him remember).

1.  Obey Mommy & Daddy
2.  Always tell the truth
3.  Respect others and their things.
(and if I were to do it again, I might add "be grateful for what you have" and/or "pick up after yourself", although the latter can be appointed through #1)

So far, these have covered all incidents (thank goodness for #1 :D)

FHE: Service

looked through this website under the topic of "service".  (how do all of you get ideas for FHE topics?)

After reading through all of them, I decided to do a bit from more than one.

I started by "accidentally" tripping and spilling crayons all over the floor.  I hoped someone would offer to help me clean up... luckily, everyone came over and helped :)

I used the printable from this lesson, though not in the way she suggested.  I wrote each family member's name on the back of the badges and everyone drew one out.  Then we colored them while we talked about what we were going to do with them.  This week we are all "Secret Servateers".  Everyone got someone's name who they would serve sometime this week, secretly, and then leave the badge behind as a symbol of the secret service being provided.

I talked about how serving others makes me happy- giving examples of how everyone had served me or someone that day- and I know it will make them happy too.  (and it's especially fun to do it secretly...)

Then we all took turns brainstorming ideas for how we could serve each person.  It was funny to hear my 3-year-old son talk about ways we could serve him.  (you could say "boo!" to me)

We'll see how it goes this week!

FHE: FAIL

So... I DID plan a lesson for this week.  But my husband was out of town on Monday, to return on Tuesday and I thought I'd rather wait for the whole family to be together.

Tuesday, my hubby is home, but he is really tired and has a headache from essentially waking up at 1am our time to get home on his flight and slept before and right after dinner, so I thought we could put it off until Wednesday.

Wednesday, my sister was in town and spent the day here, but got here later and stayed later than I anticipated so I thought we could do FHE the next night...

Thursday, my brother last minute needed someone to watch his kids all day (and I mean 12 hours all day) and so on top of them being over until after my kids were asleep, my son, I guess from all the excitement, somehow managed to fall asleep on the sofa 10 minutes before dinner and slept ALL NIGHT.  So we couldn't have FHE.

Friday, after a crazy afternoon, I decided we should go out for crepes for dinner instead of cooking.  The place wasn't expecting the crowd it had at 4:45 pm and the ONE person working there (taking orders and cooking everything) took an HOUR to get us our food.  (two more people finally came in to help as we were just finishing eating and the place was empty.  of course.) My son fell asleep in the car on the way home.

Moral of the story?  Just have FHE on Monday because other stuff will just come up.

FHE: Earthquake Safety

Here is a great handout I found about earthquake safety.  We basically just talked about what an earthquake is/feels like and went over some of the basic safety info in the handout.  We practiced getting under a table/desk, covering and holding on. We also practiced what to do if you woke up in an earthquake and took turns causing "earthquakes" for each other in their sleep so they could practice, which everyone found very fun.  This lesson was much quicker than fire safety, I don't think there is as much to go over, but I feel good that my children are more prepared and they both had fun (even if my 19-mo old was oblivious to what we were really trying to get across...)

Side note: I was thrilled that my 3 year old sond remembered what we talked about last week (fire safety) and remembered what to do if his clothes ever caught on fire. :)

FHE: Fire Safety

I don't know why I thought of this topic, and after reading a lot of information, I began to be nervous that I was going to give my kids (mostly my 3-year old boy) dangerous ideas about "fun" things he could do with fire, so I decided to mostly focus on the "what if our house/you is/are on fire" aspect of fire safety.  I also worried that it may make my children paranoid, but I think that if they know what to do and are prepared, hopefully they will feel safe.

We talked about "Stop, Drop, and Roll", and practiced that several times.  (you can bet that was fun for them)  And talked about not playing with fire, matches, or candles.  There should ALWAYS be an adult around if there is fire around.

We talked about a smoke alarm, where they are, what they do, and demonstrated what they sound like so they would know.

We talked about if you hear it and you're in a room with the door closed, you should first feel the doorknob.  If it's hot, stay where you are because the fire is on the other side of the door.  If not, you can open it.

We talked about firemen and not to be scared of them, even though they might look funny with their gas mask on.  (I showed them a picture like this)

You should always crawl to avoid the smoke.  Practice crawling around between rooms or having crawling races.

We talked about our escape plan, where to go if you're in different parts of the house, and how to get out, and we practiced.  We also got out the fire ladder kept in my husband's closet and made sure we knew how to use it to get down from our balcony.

This lesson kind of gave me a sense of peace, because I don't think I really ever thought about where I would go or what I would do if there were ever a fire in the middle of the night.  My husband's house burned down when he was younger, so to me that makes it more real (Even though we're hoping that means our chances of dealing with that are lower than average.  How many people deal with that twice in one lifetime?)

We had s'mores for a treat. :)

I'll update later if I seemed to have caused any nightmares in my 3-year old and how I dealt with it.  I'm hoping it will be ok though.  (My 18-mo old is surely too young for that).

Update:  it's now Thursday and no sign of any nightmares. :)

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.