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Family Helps: CDs, Games and FHE Ideas
By
Laurie Williams Sowby
Entertaining as well as educational products aim to help LDS families fulfill goals.
From recorded talks to games to books filled with ideas for family home evening, new LDS products can help bring the family together and focus on goals. Here are a few:
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Stay in the Lifeboat (Deseret Book, $13.95) is a talk on CD by Brad Wilcox, BYU education professor and former mission president, whose talks are as notable for their entertainment value as for their substance. Recorded before a live audience, this talk aimed at youth gives them plenty of reasons to be faithful, active members of the Church rather than seeking "freedom" outside the lifeboat of the gospel. |
Wilcox uses memorable stories, examples, and humor to show how being a member of the Church benefits a person's health, education, social network, family life and spirituality. The CD is divided into segments of 2-3 minutes each, making it easy to extract an excerpt for use in a class lesson or family home evening.
Book of Mormon Go Fish (Covenant, $9.95) is a card game suitable for 8 and up (anyone who can read), featuring Val Chadwick Bagley's whimsical cartoon characters. The 65 cards feature a colored border and numbers as well as names of people, animals, and objects found in the Book of Mormon, making them useful to play Crazy Eights, a matching game, or Old Maid (which, in this case, is a Gadianton Robber). Instructions in English are included for each of the games.
| Book of Mormon ABC (Covenant, $14.95) is a nod to the year's Sunday School curriculum, aimed at the younger set. With flaps to lift and a page full of pictures to find, this board book should keep kids quietly occupied in church meetings. Bagley's illustrations featuring bright colors, comical facial expressions and bold lines are paired with short rhymes by Amy Mullins to introduce kids to such people as Hagoth and Omni as well as more familiar people from the Book of Mormon. Words such as vision, Rameumpton and Liahona are also touched on. A wipe-off marker could be used with this book. |
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52 Weeks of Fun Family Service (Deseret Book, $14.95, softcover) is Merrilee Browne Boyack's answer to how to raise selfless children in an increasingly self-centered, materialistic world. "Service helps parents teach children to become disciples of Christ," she asserts in the introductory chapter on why families need to serve, and she offers tips for success. Then she outlines a year's worth of activities, from thank-you week to neighborhood cleanup to Sub-for-Santa, all of them adaptable for a wide range of ages. Each service project is accompanied by suggestions for songs, discussion, and other activities in Family Home Evening. |
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Teaching Your Children to Fly (Deseret Book, $13.95, softcover) takes off from Boyack's The Parenting Breakthrough , her guide to teaching children the skills they will need to function once they leave home. The insert lists, from the book, her own recommendations of skills children should have at certain ages, such as doing their own laundry at 10, using a camera at 11, making and keeping their own doctor and dental appointments at 12, and having their own recipe files and planning parties at 13.
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But the practical and entertaining CD by the popular Education Week speaker focuses more on the importance of chores (which she dubs "opportunities to serve") and how to use privileges and rewards to motivate growth that will make children independent, happy adults.
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Before They Turn Twelve (Deseret Book, $9.95, softcover) is Deborah Pace Rowley's guide for parents in "helping children gain a testimony of the Lord's standards" before they are even formally introduced to For the Strength of Youth. Each of 18 lessons contains stories, activities, songs, object lessons and games to make learning engaging and fun. Visual aids are intended to be copied and used. As the title suggests, these lessons are geared toward children in the pre-school and elementary age groups. They could easily be adapted for a Primary lesson or activity.
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Meridian Magazine.
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| About
the Author: |
Laurie Williams Sowby has been writing since grade school, and getting paid for it the past 30 years, with articles in LDS Church magazines, Exponent II, This People, Good Housekeeping , and Redbook , as well as the Deseret News , Provo Daily Herald and Utah County Journal . She is a graduate of BYU, taught writing at Utah Valley State College for 12 years, and has traveled to all 50 states and more than 35 countries (so far). She and her husband, Steve, recently returned from serving as fulltime missionaries in the Chile Santiago West Mission. They live in American Fork, Utah. Their youngest son, Rob, has returned from serving in the Germany Berlin Mission. The older four children are married and have provided more than fifteen grandchildren.
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