As a family, we’ve been using a 30-day guide to The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Instead of doing 30 activities in 30 days, we’ve been using one activity a week for Family Home Evening.
The guide we have been using for inspiration can be found HERE.
The first week, we gave each of the kids their own 5×7 copy of The Proclamation. I just printed it from my computer onto printer paper because I knew if I got them card stock copies, they would thrash them. At least with printer paper, it doesn’t matter so much.
They’ve certainly been well loved.
The first week, we talked about how the family is central to God’s plan. We told them we can be together forever so long as we live God’s plan for us. We made a list of things we can do to stay together forever.
And we each drew pictures of our family in a tree.
While I use the other site for inspiration, I end up changing things up a bit every time. This week, we talked about how we are created in God’s image. The other site had the kids painting the most adorable silhouette pictures. While it was cute, I know my kids aren’t old enough to relate it to the subject at hand. They’d mostly just be thrilled to be playing in paint.
So I thought about it as a went about my day yesterday. HOW could I help them to see that we are created in God’s own image? What activity could we do? And then it hit me.
I printed out a family picture that I had zoomed and cropped… our printer is pretty much out of ink, but it got the job done well enough.
I traced each face.
Added a body:
I made one page for each member of the family, and then I chopped our family picture up.
The original idea was to put all of the facial features (eyes, nose, mouth -all cut apart from each other) in a pile on the table and let everyone try and find their own. I cut my daughter’s picture up and placed it on her face just to get an idea…
But that was grotesque-ish.
So I printed out one more picture (poor, poor ink) and tried again.
MUCH better.
When it came time to gather ’round for FHE, I gave everyone their paper (without their face) and said, “Okay, everyone needs to make the body on their paper look like their own body!”
I held out the faces and let them pick their own out.
They glued it to their face, and then we used crayons to color the bodies on our papers to look like our real-life bodies.
She drew her bird on her arm.
After everyone was done, I said, “We just created a body that looked like us, right?”
“Yeah,” they said.
“That’s what Heavenly Father did when he made you! He made you to look like Him!” I said. It instantly clicked. I tried to drive the point home by saying things like, “Heavenly Father has two arms, legs, eyes…” but they looked at me like I was an idiot.
Duh, Mom. Of COURSE He does.
So I gave up and busted out the Jigglers instead.
It was a super short lesson, but the kids got it. They understood, and they really listened when I bore my testimony to end the lesson. I don’t think they’ve ever really listened before. It’s nice to be able to feel the spirit with little ones.
I love how you created your bodies in your own image. Very insightful. I think my kids would love this activity. Thanks for sharing! Stopping by from the Proclamation Celebration blog hop!