What we don't realize our children are learning

The prophet has asked us to do four things. Have Family Home Evening, Read the scriptures together as a family, Have Family prayer and last but not least, be a better person. Our family has diligently strived to have regular family home evenings and recently started reading scriptures together as a family. We've always had family prayer so that wasn't a challenge for us but the reading of the scriptures as a family was definately a challenge. My two youngest children are 4 and 6 years old. Their attention span isn't very long so sometimes we only get 14 versus of scriptures read. It's a fight the entire time we are reading. The girls don't seem to be paying attention. They play and fight together the entire time. Still I persist. I think I'm wasting everyone's time but since we're told to do it, I persist. Both my children absolutely amaze me in their prayer skills. They give more thanks for things than asking to bless things (I'm thrilled). The other night my 4 year old took her turn at saying the nightly bedtime prayers, in the prayer she told Heavenly Father that she was thankful we could read the scriptures! Did a mother's heart good. Maybe I'm not wasting my time reading the sciptures to the girls afterall. I guess they really are learning something afterall. Melody

Melody-you are doing the best you can, and it obviously is working. I have a really hard time with the family home evening-it's just me and my son, so we tend to drift off and not really do anything organized. we read the Book of Mormon together, but this year is D&C, and he is totally bored with it. I need to spend more time myself on scripture study-just lazy or don't know where to begin most of the time. your post has reminded me how much I have been slipping. gotta get back on track! thanks, lynn k

Hi Melody, One thing we did to help enjoy family scripture time more was buy the "New Testament for LDS Families" and also the same thing for the BOM. I'm not sure if the old testament and D&C are available or not. These are really big hardback books and they are awesome. Each chapter is broken down into sections based on content and instead of the regular footnotes at the bottom, it puts things like definitions to hard words, or explains something you read about, or talks about the JST of the verse you read, but the best thing is...it asks questions about the sections. What we do is take turns reading a section (BTW-my son is almost 9) and then if we come across some of the goodies from the bottom of the page in our section, we read them and talk about them. Then when there is a question we each take a turn giving an answer and we always let Nate go first to see what he has to say. I'm telling you, there have been a few times that he just really makes our jaws drop to the floor with the answers he gives. He has been learning a lot and I contribute it msotly to these cool new scriptures we have. I'm not sure where DH bought them but you could check Deseret Books, they might have them. Hope this helps! I hear you about when they say those things that just make your heart melt!! Bren

When we read the scriptures we actually read out of two different books. The Book of Mormon and a book called "Illustrated stories from the Book of Mormon". Each page referrences the exact scriptures they are talking about. I look at where the scriptures end in the illustrated book and I read from the BOM to that spot and then read it in the illustrated book. Makes it a little more interesting for the children but they still figit and fight the whole time. Melody

Here's another point I'd like to make. I'm always looking for those "teaching moments." I'm real sneaky about it too. When those teaching moments come up I get real vocal and start preaching, but I try to not let it sound like preaching, more like I'm expressing my opinion. Same with tv. If something comes on that I don't like I get real vocal about it. Sometimes I don't direct my comments at anyone in particular, sometimes I talk to the walls, but, you know, my kids are there so they can't help but hear me. One other thing I do is try to sneak in a scripture whenever I'm voicing my opinion. But I can't sneak in any scriptures if I don't know the scriptures right? So, at the very least, if I can't get my act together enough to have family scripture study, I need to have personal scripture study so I can zing scriptures at my kids every time they turn around and do it without them realizing what's going on. Oh ho, am I bad or what? Lynda D.