Family Home Evening Ideas

This issue contains articles and activities that could be used for family home evening. The following are some examples.

“Healing Hidden Wounds,” page 52: Look at the questions on page 56 of this article and consider setting aside time to speak with each of your children individually about pornography. Since teenagers sometimes turn to pornography to cope with challenges, consider evaluating the example you set of how to cope with challenges and committing to your children to improve. For your lesson, you could decide on family computer rules and review general conference talks on virtue (such as Elaine S. Dalton, “A Return to Virtue,” Ensign, Nov. 2008, 78). You could also use family memorabilia—such as wedding photographs and baby blessing outfits—to share the stories of how virtue has blessed your life.

“The Work of Salvation: Then and Now,” page 62: Consider discussing with your family the five responsibilities of the work of salvation identified in the article. Ask family members what the Book of Mormon and other scriptures teach us about how we can meet these responsibilities. You may want to share some of the examples from the Book of Mormon given by Elder Clayton. With the five responsibilities in mind, talk about what steps your family could take to improve their efforts in hastening the work of salvation. You could write down two or three suggestions for your family to focus on and post them where they will be seen often.

Visual Cues for Talks

When our children are assigned to give talks in Primary, we encourage them to illustrate gospel principles by helping them recall experiences from their own lives, from the scriptures, or from the Church magazines. To help them learn to give these talks on their own, we help them select pictures as visual cues. During family home evening, they practice giving their talks, glancing down at the chosen pictures to spark their memory or holding up large pictures for the entire group to see. In this way, even our young children can speak with “the power of God unto the convincing of men” (D&C 11:21).

Amber Barlow Dahl, Oregon, USA