Morning Devotional

Something I started doing while my children were attending school in France was during breakfast we had morning devotional. I was missing the precious time I had to teach my children and I wanted to use each moment we had together. In France I used that time to work on teaching my children the primary songs in French to help them acclimate and feel at home during primary. In the process of doing this I discovered how fun it is to teach the primary songs and how gospel filled they are. For my primary song devotionals I prepare picture versions of each song. I print these out twice. Then we will spend a week on each verse of the song. Here's an example of one weeks devotionals with the example following in italics for the primary song for March: My Eternal Family.

DAY 1: I usually find a story or scripture to help illustrate the gospel theme of the song to introduce the song and sing the song with the pictures.

I took a picture of our family and various other tools (including a flashlight) and showed it to our children and talked a little about each member of the family. Then I chose one child to leave the room and hid the picture and turned off the lights. Inviting the child back in I asked them to find the picture of our family. Tell the child there are people to help him and giving the flashlight to another child have them shine the way to the picture. Explain that just like we needed to use a tool (the flashlight) to find our family there are many other tools we can use to help us build our family. Tell them to listen to the song and see if they can figure out other tools we use to build our family.

DAY 2: We go through each line of the song as I explain vocabulary/concepts/pictures

The vocabulary and concepts are fairly basic in this song so on this day I set out all the pictures on the table along with other 'real' tools (ruler, hammer, screwdiver, level etc..) As we sang through the song the children took turns choosing a tool to represent a part of the song and attached a picture.

DAY 3: We play various games with the songs/pictures

Games: using the two of each picture play memory. When someone finds a match they have to sing the matching line of the song as well.

Set out all the pictures and then have once child close their eyes and another child remove one or two pictures. Then the other child has to figure out what was removed.

Set out the pictures face down in a stack. Flip the top pictures over and whoever remembers that line of the song first raises their hand, sings it and wins that picture.

DAY 4: Either play more games for learning the song or plan another activity to help teach understanding of the song.

Attach each picture to a lego or other building block, also attach each family members name to a block. Build a pyramid or tower together and talk about how each family member is important to the building.

DAY5: We have a recital where every person takes a turn singing the song

I will often do our Family Home Evening on the same theme because there are so many fun ideas and activities to reinforce the lessons in the songs.

For this FHE we read several scriptures about building families and discussed them and then built a family pyramid. To make it even more fun we used the camera timer and tried to catch a photo.

At the end of the week I print out the picture-song with words onto one landscape sheet of paper(see example at beginning of post) and put it into my children's primary picture song book and they like to look at it during Sacrament meeting.

I enjoy putting together my own picture-songs but if you would like to implement something similar without much work there are flip-charts and teaching ideas galore for primary songs at sugardoodle.net