June Family Home Evening Plan

I love family home evening!  They're not always easy and some nights as I'm trying to alternately shush and talk over my kids who sometimes struggle with sitting still for more than a few minutes together I wonder if I'm going to make it until they all move out.  But, I know that through the struggles, we are helping to develop a pattern of righteousness in their lives.

I was recently perusing at a Deseret Book and read the jacket of President Henry B. Eyring's new book Choose Higher Ground.  In it he shares a story where he's frustrated at how hard things (life) seems to be.  His mother shares some wonderful advice with him when she tells him that if you're going the right direction, you're always going uphill.  I LOVE IT!  And it's applicable to so many of the seemingly simple (but not usually) counsel for our families, like family home evening.

Just a quick review of my family home evening purpose. First and foremost, our family home evenings are a place for us to be together, helping each other grow. To meet this purpose, I try to plan family home evening's that helps my daughter meet some of her Personal Progress requirements and my son pass off some of his Cub Scout achievements. In addition to this, we focus on teachings found in the most recent General Conference talks whenever possible.

Week 1
We always spend the first part of the first Monday talking about and checking progress on our 2013 goals. If you haven't made any yet, it's never too late! The kids love to set their own goals, see what everyone else chooses and seting a few for our family as a whole. It's a really great experience that we all love.

I was looking through some packets I've had for years, trying to find some inspiration for the month and two jumped out at me.  Both have to do with the influence we have over those in our home.  I don't know about your house, but we occasionally (or maybe not so occasionally) struggle with keeping a positive attitude and once one of us loses the battle, it's only a matter of time until it spreads.

I also really wanted to focus on a General Conference talk and as I was looking through my issue, I came across Elder Richard G. Scott's address and read, "It is important for parents to teach children to recognize how their actions affect each individual who lives in the home."  Perfect.

The lesson is titled Put a Smile on Your Face and teaches about things that can cause happy and bad feelings in the home and what we can do about them. 

It starts with a fun object lesson where you attached sad or smiley faces to either the bad or good feelings pictures with string (so the faces are dangling beneath), then you have a family member walk through the faces and ask them what happened.  You get smacked in the face by feelings in our home everyday (just like the dangling faces) and wouldn't it be better to get hit with good feelings?

You also evaluate yourself to see how well you think you're doing on the positivity front, set goals to do better and set goals to track happy deeds you've done for others in the family in the upcoming weeks.  Simple and exactly what our family needs!

Week 2
Wolf Scout Achievement 9 talks about being safe both at home and on the street.  There's a little bit about sidewalk, crosswalk and bike safety that Ben and I have already read through, so we're going to focus on home hazards and having a family emergency plan.  We made one years ago and never got around to making another one.  Shame on me, I know.

We're going to slowly start to solve my lack of preparation with tonight's family night.  We'll talk about dangers in our home, how to keep things clean and organized so we don't fall, label dangerous materials, and learn where the circuit breaker and water shutoff are. 

Then we'll talk about what to do in an emergency AND make a plan.  There are lots of great examples of emergency evacuation floor plans on google, but my favorite find is this emergency preparedness blog post.  It's got EVERYTHING you could think of for a family night: 72 hour kits, emergency plans, earthquake and tornado, floods and tsunami, tornado and fire, plus some word searches, crosswords and a board game to really bring all the information home.  We're going to follow the basic outline for the Make An Emergency Plan family home evening, but we're definitely going to work our way through more of these!

Week 3
This month, the youth are focusing on the priesthood and the priesthood keys, so I thought it'd be fun to do a lesson on it with our family. I found the perfect lesson on Parenting in the Latter-days that teaches about the restoration, organization, blessings and keys of the priesthood. This lesson is so BIG that if your kids are smaller (and have shorter attention spans) you could break it down into a few different family nights. She has pictures, puzzles and games to play to reinforce the concepts (and keep everyone paying attention).

Week 4
A few months ago while I was looking through a few different family home evening blogs, I came across several patriotic themed family nights on Chocolate on my Cranium.  The 14th of this month is Flag Day and, of course, the 4th of July is just around the corner, so I thought it'd be perfect to fit a few of them in. 

1. The Star Spangled Banner
2. Patriotism
3. Pledge of Allegiance
4. Preamble to the US Constitution

She made/adapted these from a pamphlet entitled Family Home Evening Lessons for the Bicentennial of the Constitution put out by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  There are other ideas there so if you want to check them out, you can download a pdf copy from the link above.

We're going to do the Star Spangled Banner in June and another one next month in July (I'm leaning toward the Patriotism one right now).  Although, if you wanted, you could spend the month of June focused only on patriotic lessons, or maybe the week before the 4th, do a sort of walk through patriotic family nights to build up to it. 

Hope you have a great month!!