"Wherefore, I said unto you, feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do." (2 Nephi 32:3)
Need an activity that gets your family FEASTING on the scriptures? Scripture Cookies!
Do you know Romero Britto orhis art? I didn't until I saw this Britto-Inspired Heart tutorial from Deep Space Sparkle. It looked like such a cheery project! I wanted to do these with my kids. Little did I know how much my daughter would be inspired by it; she was next to me when I first watched the video and after she went to bed she stayed up doing one of her own that very night!
The next day we learned a little about Britto himself, looked at some of his art, watched the video, and then got busy. We spent hours and hours doing these, not so much because they take a long time to create but because we enjoyed it enough to do multiple pieces, into the evening. Everyone did at least one heart piece, and then everyone started doing their own ideas.
You know something is a hit when you see your kids doing it independently later. During down time for days afterward I saw my kids pull out the markers and cardstock and make something new. These are perfect for making your house cheerful and colorful for Valentines Day.
A great tool for demonstrating alliteration to students is the retelling of the story of the prodigal son--"in the key of F." You can't get more alliterative than this! I sure wish I knew who wrote this. It is brilliant and they deserve credit!
The Prodigal Son in the Key of F
Feeling footloose and frisky, a featherbrained fellow forced his father to fork over his farthings. Fast he flew to foreign fields and frittered his family's fortune, feasting fabulously with floozies and faithless friends. Flooded with flattery he financed a full-fledged fling of "funny foam" and fast food.
Fleeced by his fellows in folly, facing famine, and feeling faintly fuzzy, he found himself a feed-flinger in a filthy foreign farmyard. Feeling frail and fairly famished, he fain would have filled his frame with foraged food from the fodder fragments.
"Fooey," he figured, "my father's flunkies fare far fancier," the frazzled fugitive fumed feverishly, facing the facts. Finally, frustrated from failure and filled with foreboding (but following his feelings) he fled from the filthy foreign farmyard.
Faraway, the father focused on the fretful familiar form in the field and flew to him and fondly flung his forearms around the fatigued fugitive. Falling at his father's feet, the fugitive floundered forlornly, "Father, I have flunked and fruitlessly forfeited family favor."
Finally, the faithful Father, forbidding and forestalling further flinching, frantically flagged the flunkies to fetch forth the finest fatling and fix a feast.
Faithfully, the father's first-born was in a fertile field fixing fences while father and fugitive were feeling festive. The foreman felt fantastic as he flashed the fortunate news of a familiar family face that had forsaken fatal foolishness. Forty-four feet from the farmhouse the first-born found a farmhand fixing a fatling.
Frowning and finding fault, he found father and fumed, "Floozies and foam from frittered family funds and you fix a feast following the fugitive's folderol?" The first-born's fury flashed, but fussing was futile. The frugal first-born felt it was fitting to feel "favored" for his faithfulness and fidelity to family, father, and farm. In foolhardy fashion, he faulted the father for failing to furnish a fatling and feast for his friends. His folly was not in feeling fit for feast and fatling for friends; rather his flaw was in his feeling about the fairness of the festival for the found fugitive.
His fundamental fallacy was a fixation on favoritism, not forgiveness. Any focus on feeling "favored" will fester and friction will force the faded facade to fall. Frankly, the father felt the frigid first-born's frugality of forgiveness was formidable and frightful. But the father's former faithful fortitude and fearless forbearance to forgive both fugitive and first-born flourishes.
The farsighted father figured, "Such fidelity is fine, but what forbids fervent festivity for the fugitive that is found? Unfurl the flags and finery, let fun and frolic freely flow. Former failure is forgotten, folly is forsaken. Forgiveness forms the foundation for future fortune."
Four facets of the father's fathomless fondness for faltering fugitives are:
1) Forgiveness
2) Forever faithful friendship
3) Fadeless love, and
4) A facility for forgetting flaws
I love, love, loved using the new video for the 2016 Mutual Theme, "Press Forward," in one of our New Year devotionals, along with some of the articles from theJanuary New Era.
My favorite images are the youth walking the Salt Flats; the ending scenes are powerful!
If you know me at all, you're aware that I like to kick off each new year with a special lesson that has elements of discovery, discussion, meditation, and expression. I love to try to inspire myself and my family to stand a little taller and try a little harder. I also love to understand my children's reflections of the past year and their hopes for the new year.
This year I used a song, "One Minute More," that has been on my mind a lot for well over a year. I listen to it almost every day as I exercise (it's great for moving to!) and I really like it for the music. More than the music, though, it has come to mean a lot to me. I've actually worked up an entire application for missionaries, complete with scriptures, as well as gospel applications for every day life and people. But I didn't want to just hand all that to my children, I wanted them to find it for themselves. So, I printed off the lyrics, we listened to the song together, and then we talked and I asked them what gospel applications they saw and heard and asked them to find scriptures to back it up.
Here are just a couple of the scriptures that were shared and discussed:
"For behold, it is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore he receiveth no reward.
"Verily I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness;
"For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves. And inasmuch as men do good they shall in nowise lose their reward."
(D&C 58:26-28)
"For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors." (Alma 34:32)
After this I handed everyone a manila file folder to use as a base for their 2015/2016 project. The assignment was to somehow express
2 great memories from 2015 0 accomplishment, meaning a 2015 goal not reached, and why 1 scripture that had personal meaning in 2015 5 lessons learned in 2015
They were to create a list of 16 hopes/dreams/goals for 2016 that they could personally effect, then choose a line from "One Minute More" that stood out to them and write how it can influence them this year.
Below is a video link to the song and the lyrics. Personally, I don't usually like watching music videos because they often ruin a song for me. This video is the lyric video version, but it's really here so that you can listen to the song. The lyrics are written out below in a less distracting way.
My emotional response is due in part to the appearance that Nepalese children, who have nothing, are having a better experience than American children, who have everything. Why? Because somewhere along the way someone here decided that children should be treated as mechanical objects to be programmed and used and managed and controlled rather than as living, breathing, sensing beings full of life that need to be... living and breathing and sensing life. Somewhere along the way someone decided that things that can be counted count more than anything else--certainly more than happy, healthy children. And somewhere along the way everyone else got caught up in the counting and failed to notice that with all of our everything, we aren't giving our children anything that matters.
That this article was written as though it's the discovery of a lifetime makes my head spin. Hallelujah that people are seeing it--yes! But none of it is new. While this may be "uncharted territory" simply because in all our counting we've never counted this--it's the way children learned for years and years and years--in much happier, bygone days.
Read the article. And then take your kids outside.
I have loved doing resist art since I was in the 2nd grade and we made crayon and water color resist pieces to go with our unit study on oceans. (Resist means that the wax of the crayon will repel the water color away from it. There are other mediums of resist art as well, but simple crayon and watercolor is the cheapest and handiest.) When I saw That Artist Woman's January Pocket Project, it reminded me that it had been too long since the last resist art project I did with my kids, so I took a cue from her snowflake ATC for a project of our own.
First, though, we read Snowflake Bentley, one of my favorite picture books. I read it to them every winter because I think Bentley is inspiring and I hope that just once my kids will catch his passion and dedication to something he loved and believed in and internalize it.
(If it is snowing outside the day you do this, bundle up and take some black paper outside with you to catch snowflakes on. Bring a magnifying glass and see the amazing intricacy of snowflakes for yourself. Kids love this!)
Then I read a few scientific paragraphs out of The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty, but mostly we looked at the amazing photographs and talked about shape and symmetry. We then used the photographs of real snowflakes to guide us in our art.
Step 1: Draw snowflakes on white paper with a white crayon. It's tricky to see what you're doing, but if you push hard with the crayon and use the light right, you can see where you've drawn. We used regular printing paper, but you could also use other white paper. Try to copy the 6-sided or hexagonal pattern most often found in snowflakes, and make them symmetrical, but make each one you draw different from all the others, just the way nature does it.
Step 2: Using blue water color, paint over the entire paper. Your snowflakes will resist the paint and "pop" out at you.
Step 3: Let it all dry out.
Step 4: Embellish. We all used a silver Sharpie marker to add some sparkle, just making dots with it. I just put dots on the blue background, while my kids put dots on their snowflakes. I glued shimmery sequins to the center of my snowflakes.
Step 5: Add a cardstock backing to stabilize, frame, and finish your masterpiece.
On one of the last days of 2015, we ended the year where we began it, taking the same lovely canyon hike in about the same freezing 10 degrees. We didn't really plan to do this, but I'm sure glad things turned out that way.
Though some people might like to end the year somewhere other than where they began it, perhaps to symbolize progress or change, I found a strength and comfort from being right back where 2015 began. For me it symbolized that even after all the challenging, wonderful, painful, exciting, heartbreaking, crazy experiences of the year that I couldn't and didn't foresee in the beginning, I and we were still standing. We made it! Hopefully better and stronger, but still together, still ourselves, coming full circle to marvel at life and all its surprises and to be reminded that the upheavals of life are like the forming of mountains: geological processes are at once violent and turbulent--crashing and pushing--and wearing and weakening--beating and eroding--and it's through these processes that glorious landscapes, and people, emerge.
Oh, to list the tragedies and triumphs, the misfortunes and marvels of the past year! They're many, and many of them are too personal to share, but somewhere between my sobbing broken heart as I buried my beloved cat and the hysterical laughter in surround sound at my dining room table during family games and meals, my own tell-tale strata was laid that shape and define me.
This hike was perfect food for thought for other reasons, too. I was very upset to find that since our last visit, someone had vandalized one of my favorite spots.
I actually felt personally violated since this place holds a place in my heart and someone thought it fine to defile it. I do not understand vandalism. But I couldn't help but think of this as a series of scars. Some people see scars as ugly and disfiguring, a ruination of perfection. But scars tell a story and they bear record of survival, healing, and overcoming as well. With the ugliness of the spray paint comes the reminder that the rock is not moving, it's still standing firm.
Also along the way were reminders that every kindness, every effort to cheer is a gift and a light and it doesn't take much to share those things with others along the way of life.
Sharing with fellow travelers.
Marking and brightening the way.
And so we look out from where we are today toward another year of the unknown.
Ready or not, we've got to take it on.
I just hope I can always see the forest for the trees.
