I love when simple family home evenings make the best ones. That is my goal by sharing this FHE with Small Children series as often as possible. This past Monday night, we had a family home evening where my kids really listened, the lesson was short, and everyone got to participate.
We started out talking about our own family. I asked my kids the following questions:
Who is in our family?
Do you think we have a happy family?
Do we want to make our family stronger?
I then told them about The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Since my children are so little, there was no way that we could conquer reading the whole thing, so I focused on what the Proclamation says about having happiness in families. We read:
“Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”
I gave each member of our family a building block to hold. I used the kind that can link together. I asked them to name a way that we could have a stronger family. I started and told them that we can have FHE each week. I placed my block on the table. Then, each member of the family named something different. As we named different things I pointed out that our wall (or our family) was getting stronger with each block. It was harder to break down. They seemed to understand the comparison that everything we do to create a happier family makes our family stronger.
I bore my testimony to them that I know that we can all try harder to do all the things we had mentioned like, family prayer, reading our scriptures, loving each other, sharing, helping each other, etc. I likened the wall we had built out of building blocks to our family and told them that I knew we had a happy family, but that we could be even happier and stronger.
We sang Families Can Be Together Forever for our closing song. It was a great, simple lesson that really “stuck”. Since the lesson, I have been able to gently remind them, “Does this make our family stronger?” or “What can you do in this situation to make our family stronger?” and they have been coming up with solutions. It was a great reminder about how we all need to strengthen each other in our family.
Other FHE Ideas for Small Children: