Family Home Evening

Every Monday evening we get our little family together for "Family Home Evening." It's an idea instituted by our church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I think it's the most wonderful idea ever, and my kids love it too. They look forward to FHE all week long. Every Monday they each get assigned a job, and whether it's to do the lesson or the activity or plan the treat or pick a scripture to read or a song to sing they are equally thrilled to be a part of our big family night.

Tonight we combined our Family Home Evening and our preschool lesson because I didn't have time during the day to get to the preschool lesson. We were pretty busy getting prepared for Valentine's day and the big surprise we were planning for our daddy (which involved a lot of baking)!

Anyway, I feel I am not unduly proud of our heart-themed FHE (they are not usually so well coordinated) so here's what went down in our house:

Song: we always let our kids pick whatever song they want when it's their turn. if it's "I'm a Little Teapot," well, then, so be it.

Prayer: someone gets a turn to do this too.

Lesson: we read an article out of the February 2012 Friend magazine entitled, "My Heart is Happy" and talked about what types of things make our hearts happy.

Activity: earlier in the day we had read the book, My Map Book, by Sara Fanelli, and now we took the opportunity to make maps of our hearts similar to the author of the book, based on our conversation about things that make our hearts happy. I got this idea from the Playful Learning website.

This picture is from the Playful Learning website-it's not my own-because we forgot to take a picture while we were painting. I don't know what the other author used, but we used watercolor paper; black sharpies for the lines, pictures and words; and watercolor paints. They turned out beautiful!

Treat: earlier in the day I had made red cinnamon rolls (dyed the dough red with food coloring), with pink frosting! Heart-shaped sugar cookies were my second choice, but I wanted to eat cinnamon rolls more ;-)

The end. Our FHE's are pretty short because our kids are still really small with relatively short attention spans. Usually, I'd say 95% of the time, our activity is a physical activity like swinging the kids in blankets, or jumping contests, or playing Red Light/Green Light. So I was worried that painting wouldn't be something that proved equally enjoyable for the kids, but it turned out to be a smash hit!