Come Follow Me

This year we have been using a home religious study in addition to our regular church attendance. This curriculum is called "Come Follow Me For Individuals and Families" and this year it is focused on the New Testament. This has been an incredible opportunity to help my boys (and Max and myself) become more familiar with our Savior Jesus Christ. We have been able to have some great discussions in our home and my children are becoming more familiar with bible stories. I mostly just wanted to document some of the activities we have been doing that have helped us learn so I can remember what has worked and what didn't.

The first week we talked about the parable of the ten virgin and being prepared to meet Christ by keeping our oil lamps filled. We pulled out our old Oil lamp so my children could actually see what an oil lamp is, We talked about what we should be doing to get drops of oil in our lamps. We set up a jar with a picture of an oil lamp and  decided to add beads when we do things that bring us closer to Christ. We added beads each night for things like saying our prayers, going to church, reading scriptures, doing acts of kindness etc. It took a couple months but it filled quicker than we realized. On the day the jar was almost full, Charlie was up early reading the scriptures and praying. 

It was full, and got knocked over (and broke) just as we were leaving for our prize.

Our prize was to go on an outing and walk around the temple and the visitor center. And then go out for ice cream. The temple walk was amazing, there was lightly falling snow and the boys were all happy!

The boys always love the visitor center as well so that was a fun time!

And boy were they excited to pick out their own ice cream with their gift cards from Grandpa Rob.

And as I'm writing this I realized that I didn't take many photos of our activities so I'm trying to remember them. Here we built a temple and Jesus as a young boy.

Some other activities include discussing Jesus' baptism, and Charlie's upcoming baptism. Max and I were able to share about our baptism days and it was an uplifting and mature discussion that turned out better than expected. Then to get them moving, because most of our lessons need some sort of science experiment, the kids launched tissues in the air with straws to represent the Holy Ghost descending like a dove.

We've had lots of variations of Don't Eat Pete using Scriptures, apostle pictures, etc.

Also, I'm glad I'm doing this now, because I really have forgotten a lot but I feel like we've had so many good discussion and my kids have been asking great questions. Okay, I'm going through the manual now to help me remember...

We've spoken of the miracles Jesus performed and played a matching game to remember them.

We had an object lesson on the wise man and the foolish man.

Discussed parents receiving revelation to protect their children.

We've had some awesome lessons on resisting temptation. We gave each of the kids an m&m and told them they could eat it right away, or they could wait 10 minutes and they may get a bigger prize instead. My kids all did surprisingly well, even Edwin. They ask to be tempted all the time now. Haha, He had discussion on how this applies to real life.

Discussed living water, discussed the necessity of water.

Discussed prayer and challenged the kids to think of some things to pray about before starting their prayer and to pray for someone they had never prayed for.

Charlie created a lesson where he made everyone a paper airplane and we had to get the paper airplane to Jesus ( a chair he set up in the living room) and once we got the airplane on the chair, we had to say someone we were going to pray for. Then Miles decided he wanted to sit on Jesus' lap (in the chair) and told us how Jesus blessed the children.

Oftentimes I feel like I should be doing more, when I take the time to study, my mind races with ideas that will help my boys, but oh so often our evenings and weekends are filled with activities and busyness. But even with the little effort we've put in, our boys have come to learn so much more and our Gospel discussions in our home have increased about 500% So really, I know this is an inspired program and we're grateful for the spirit it has brought into our home.