On Family Home Evening

Family Home Evening is something that we have gotten a lot better at over the past few years. We almost always have FHE, and we’ve moved from activity/outing-based to lesson-based evenings, which has been very good for our family.

As with pretty much everything we do well, this is a direct result of Summer’s sensitivity to the spirit. A few years ago, she rather freaked out about Allyson getting baptized, so we ramped up our FHE, with a special focus on what baptism is.

This year, as we prepare for Ryan’s baptism, we have made a few changes to how we plan and conduct FHE. For a while now we’ve used a wheel that indicates who has lesson, song, prayer, activity, and treat. But what’s better than a wheel? A spreadsheet.

Summer and I sat down and made a calendar for the year’s Mondays and each person’s assignment. Then, we assigned lesson topic categories. (This is part I’m really excited about...here is comes...) On the first Monday of the month the lesson will focus on that month’s Primary sharing time theme (it just so happens that our stake is using these monthly themes as sacrament meeting topics, so this FHE each month gives me a chance to think about my talk). On the second Monday we will talk about some facet of baptism, using the Primary sharing time themes from several years ago, which focused on baptism. The third Monday’s lesson comes from Preach My Gospel, and the fourth Monday’s lesson comes from the new Nursery manual, Behold Your Little Ones (the best Church teaching resource ever, I believe). If there are five Monday’s the last one is a fun outing.

As there are five of us who give lessons, this creates a nice rotation of topics, so everyone gets a taste of the different topics. The rest of the tasks also rotate each week (and we set it up so when Isaac has lesson, Summer and I have easy stuff—song or prayer) and can help him with his lesson).

We’ve only had one Monday so far this year, but the system seems to be working well. And we’ve got a swell spreadsheet with each month’s assignments, so that’s an extra bonus...