Family Home Evening Fun!

Now that we have a 2 year old, we're becoming focused on our mission to hold weekly family home evenings & its been a lot of fun! (I'd love too hear your ideas for us!!!) It was tough when it was just the two of us for so long because we were together every night, so we were never very good about having a special family home evening. I posted on sugardoodle's facebook page what we were doing for family home evening tonight & had someone ask some questions about it, so I typed up a long e-mail to send back with the ideas that we've used so far & thought I'd share them here as well. My post on sugardoodle said that we were going to tell a simple version of Noah's Ark tonight & then do a Noah's Ark file folder game. So, here's my response to her:



We've just started a few weeks ago as well & are having fun with it! I typed in "free file folder games" for a google search & found a few that way, though most were secular instead of religious (numbers, etc.).

But I also found some through sugardoodle.net listed under "file folder games". I wish I had saved the websites where I found each one, but I didn't :(

A couple other fun things we've done that our son has really liked:
1. I laminated a picture of Jesus and he got to hold it while we talked about when Jesus was born. We then put it up on the wall in his bedroom & he loves to point out Jesus!
2. I laminated a picture of the temple & we talked in very simple terms about the temple (just a couple of sentences really) and then sang "I love to see the temple". Again, we put this picture up on his bedroom wall next to the picture of Christ.
3. On one site I found a "family tree". Its a picture of a tree and has labels for places to put pictures of "me", mom, dad, and each set of grandparents. I laminated it all along with pictures of all the family members mentioned to make a file folder type game. This is his favorite thing & is especially great since we don't live near family.
4. I recently got a subscription to the Friend and I've been tearing out the pages that are good for the younger age and putting them in sheet protectors. So, we've read a couple of the Joseph Smith stories from there . . . very few words, lots of pictures! Also, the picture pages from both the Friend & Ensign are great to add.
5. I grew up with what we called "Talent Night" for family home evening, where each of the kids had to perform a talent. One night we did a similar thing & video taped Chase doing all the fun things he's doing at this age!

Aha, I found it! Thought I'd do a quick search to see if I could find any of the ones I've used again:

Noah's Ark:
http://www.mormonchic.com/crafty/filefolders.asp

Family Tree:
http://s466.photobucket.com/albums/rr29/Telsee/?action=view&current=familytreecopy.jpg

Also, after our VERY short lesson, we spend a while singing action songs like Popcorn Popping, Once there was a snowman, ring around the rosies, London Bridges, etc. My son loves to do that!