FHE: I am a Child of God

As I was preparing for Family Home Evening this week, I knew that I would be writing this post. I also knew that it would be Mother's Day right after. I thought about doing a lesson on mothers. But, I thought it felt a little weird for me, the mom, to give a lesson about moms.

I decided, instead, to give a lesson about being a child of God.

I believe that this is one of the most important things I can teach my children.

I like to use the Primary lesson manuals as a starting point for preparing my lessons. I just find it helps me focus my thoughts. Because my kids are 2 years old and 1 year old, I use both the Nursery manual and the Sunbeam manual for ideas. (All church manuals can be found online at lds.org)

Nursery Manual

Sunbeam Manual

For my lesson I decided to take ideas from both of these lessons, but put my own twist on them.

I had two objectives for my lesson.

1) I wanted to help my kids understand that because they are children of Heavenly Father they can grow up to be like Him.

2) I wanted to teach my kids that we are all children of our Heavenly Father.

To teach the first concept, I found pictures of different animals as babies and as adults (i.e. puppy-dog, kitten-cat).

 I put these pictures into a powerpoint slideshow.

(The manual said to find pictures in magazines, but I don't have magazines in our house. And, I don't have a flannel board, so flannel board stories were out of the question.)

My powerpoint slideshow was simple (keep in mind the young age of my children), but they loved it! I let them push the buttons to change the slides as we read the captions to each picture.

Here is the slideshow in picture format. You'll get the idea.

I am in NO WAY an expert at powerpoint. I am sure that many of you moms out there will do a much better job than me. That said, I found that using powerpoint was a fun way to show my kids pictures that took relatively little preparation time.

My son liked the pictures so much that he asked to watch the slideshow again and again throughout the week. I took this to be a good sign. It was also another chance to reinforce the lesson.

To finish up the lesson and meet my second goal, I found pictures of everyone in our family and both sets of grandparents. While I played the song "I am a Child of God" in the background, we looked at the pictures and talked about each person is a child of God. (Then, of course, we closed with a prayer.)

Well, there you have it. I know the lesson was short, but it got right to the point. I know that my kids enjoyed it and continue to enjoy the pictures. Hopefully you will be able get some ideas from our humble efforts.

How have you taught your kids the principle of being a child of God?

If you have any ideas for family home evenings we would love to hear them, whether they be about being a child of God or another gospel topic. Please leave a comment or send us at email at thevillageformoms@gmail.com

Lisa