During conference this year, President Hinckley urged families to use the general conference talks as the basis for family home evening lessons. If you have been struggling to come up with ideas of what to teach at family home evening, your problems are solved. There are enough talks that you can cover one each week between now and the next General Conference session. You can also teach lessons based on topic. In the May issue of the Ensign, then you can look in the index to group on topic. Here are a few tips to help you use these as family home evening lessons.
1) If you have younger children you may want to read the talk and pull out the central idea. Then you can create a lesson based on that topic. You may also want to find a scripture story or a story from the Friend on that topic. It would be great if you had a visual aid or picture; this can help hold your children’s attention. It is also fun to come up with an activity that relates to it.
2) If you have teenagers you may want to encourage your children to read the talk ahead of time. This can encourage a better discussion. It is important to help your teenagers relate to the topic and what it is teaching. You can also use the scriptures to illustrate the points in the talk. You can have your children teach from the talks as well.
3) While you should read the talk several times to prepare for the lesson, you should avoid reading the talk aloud during family home evening. You can share quotes, but you likely will not hold people’s attention if you reread the talk. If you are technology savvy, you can view the clips on the Internet and share the quotes with your children that way.
4) You may want to create journals for your children to take notes in. This can be the beginning of a talk file for you children. This is a great way to improve the comprehension and memory of your children. Younger children can draw a picture, while older children can write out a summary or what they learned.
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