Sharing Time - July Week 2

This whole month is all about the family and how to make them stronger. 

Awesome. 

After everything is said and done, as primary leaders, we only have so much influence over our children.  They come every week (or not quite, or not at all) to hear our lessons and feel our love, but they are with their families the whole rest of the week. 

Which is a good thing. 

It's an even better thing if we can influence their families to either begin or continue learning the gospel together. 

So for this week, I've chosen a few fun family home evening lessons that teach about both prayer and scripture study to use for Sharing Time.  After going through different parts of both lessons and talking about the importance of exercising these two principles as a family, I'll ask the kids about other ways they can learn gospel as a family.

Even though I'm looking for someone to say Family Home Evening, there are a lot of good ideas and I'll let them brainstorm on it for a minute or two. 

After they get FHE, I'll tell them that I got our WHOLE Sharing Time from a few different family home evening lessons I found online.  Now that they know how to do the games/object lessons/stories, they can do them for their own families so they can learn and grow together!

Prayer
I found two lessons on prayer I like.  They both teach about the principle of prayer differently and they're both fairly short (easier for mass copying).  They're also both from Chocolate on my Cranium.

The first is a little more basic and might be best for Junior Primary.  It goes over where and how to pray.  I love the story of the rameumpton and thought it might be fun to tell the kids I'm going to show them how to pray and then copy what the Zoramites did.  After finishing I could then ask the kids if I did it right.  Then we could go over what Alma and Amulek taught about praying anywhere in our hearts.

The second talks more about having meaningful prayer as a family.  I LOVE the bridge object lesson.  I also really like how it talks about different things we can pray about.  I can get stuck in a rut with my prayers and forget how many different ways I can express thanks and ask for blessings and this is perfect to remedy that problem!

After finishing up, I'll make sure we've talked about how prayer can strengthen our families (and not just by praying together, but praying FOR each other).

Scripture Study
I'll start this section with a quote by David M. McConkie, "Immerse yourself in the scriptures.  We cannot love what we do not know."  I LOVE this quote.  A lot.

I found a fun, short FHE on Homemaking Honeys that's got some really great ideas.  They start with the basics (which is what we should all do) by asking the kids what the 4 books of scripture are?  I thought it'd be fun to make it into a game and expanding just a bit by seeing who can figure out which description goes with which book.  Then match individual books of scripture (like 1st Nephi to the Book of Mormon) and a few prophets to each book. 

This isn't a download and print lesson like the others, so I made my own.  I used the lesson from Homemaking Honeys as the base and added the game for the FHE print out (if you do it two sided it's only 2 pages!) and then I made all the information on the four books of scripture a little bigger to work better for sharing time.  Click on the links below to download the pdf's from google docs.

Scripture FHE
Scripture Sharing Time Game

After playing the matching game, ask the kids to tell you how studying the scriptures can bring you closer together as a family.

Testimony Challenge
After talking about how Sharing Time is really a few Family Home Evening lessons (see above), challenge the kids to go home and teach them to their families!