Daily Family Scripture Study

Okay so I said I would blog about this once I got a good plan.  I'm not sure it's a good plan, but it's working so here I am to tell you all about it.

To start, daily family scripture study has not been a strong point for us.  Sad but true.  I have made several attempts over the last couple of years to change that, but because our kids are so young it's stupid hard to keep everyone on track.  We got to the point where it was somewhat like General Conference: get the kids all in one room, keep them somewhat occupied with church based/family based activity and hope that some of the information was sinking in to their little heads.  Unlike Conference it had to happen daily and it was stressful and exhausting and ended up with bad feelings all around.

I have been praying for a way to do this with the kids that will at least keep their interest for more than 10 minutes.  I had a half formed idea that instead of just reading straight from the scriptures and trying to explain after reading that I would pick individuals or stories from the scriptures to talk about and then just read the key scriptures involved.  That seemed crazy daunting to me to organize and do every single day and I did reach out for story ideas on Facebook (which so many of you supplied and I'm so glad you did, thank you!).

Then I remembered something very important.  This work had already been done for me and was available on LDS.org. I know some of you remember the Book of Mormon Stories book from childhood.  Had all the pictures with explanations and then several scriptures to read about the stories.  I got online and sure enough, there was the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants all simplified into stories with recommended scriptures for me. You can click each of the book links above to view the manuals online. 

I pulled a generic 2015 calendar from the internet and gave each day a lesson from the manuals starting with the Old Testament. I left Monday's out because we do Family Home Evening that night and I know that for us doubling up would be impossible (especially while Brady is currently working evenings so I am on my own for quite a bit of this). Once I used up all the lessons from all four books I was near mid-October.  I'm thinking I'll have to come up with something else a that point, or start over from the beginning with the lessons and maybe have Cadence and Rory do some of the scripture finding work. I had the thought that you don't have to go through each book in order like we are doing either.  You could mix it up a bit and jump around. 

To plan the actual lessons/reading I usually pull up the lesson on my computer and go through it all and decide which scriptures to use.  Sometimes the scriptures chosen are repeated more than once in the lesson and I know that would bug my kids to be reading the same scripture over and over.  So I pick and choose so we aren't being repetitive and sometimes add some other ones that I liked better.  I usually put everything in order in a document on my computer and print it out, including the scriptures in larger print so I can have Rory try and read some of the shorter ones.

I use my print out to keep us on track, and the last couple of nights I used my iPad while we did the reading so that my two little ones could see the pictures involved from the lesson.  Cadence and Rory are always completely engrossed in our reading.  Owen and Beckah seem to zone in and out, but they are 2 and 3 and they are doing so much better then they every have before.  It's also going pretty fast (20 minutes max) so no one is getting bored or frustrated.

All in all I'm happy with what I've come up with and super thankful that most of the work has been done for me!