lds.org resources for Family Home Evening

Lds.org has GREAT resources!
Go to lds.org and click on home and family and then family home evening. From there you can go to Helps for Family home evening, Lesson topics, activities, or resources. Exploring under these topics, you can learn how to make a family home evening planning wheel so that all family members are involved. You can learn how to involve your teenagers or how to plan lessons around very young children. You can even learn about how to do family home evening with just adults.

There are even strategies for helping get the right attitude so that Family Home Evening is a happy time, rather than becoming a drudgery or dreaded.

There are 25 different lesson topics provided to get you started, and from there you can create your own ideas to meet your own family's needs. Great resources are conference talks, Ensign articles, New Era articles, or articles from the Friend magazine. The Friend magazine has other fun things, such as a slide show on making friends or young children can have the stories from the Friend read to them. This can be useful for a young reader as well. There are also interactive coloring pages, games, or scriptures stories. At the back of these magazines (or at the end of some of the articles) there are Family Home Evening ideas.

You can even center Family Home Evenings around the Faith in God for children, Duty to God for young men, or Personal Progress for young women.

A fun place to go is to the music section under "resources." The thing that is so great about this site is that you can not only look up and print off the music for songs, but you can have the songs played on the computer using the interactive church music player. You can type in a song and it will go to it and show you the music and you can play it. If it is too high for you, you can put it in a lower key and sing it. If it is too slow or too fast, you can change the tempo. Some songs even include actions for singing it in sign language. You can also download church songs to mp3 players or iPods (for free), even the new songs the children will be singing for the Sacrament Meeting program, including "My Eternal Family" and "I Know my Savior Loves Me" (a very beautiful song). This includes Young Women songs and Seminary songs. In fact, you can download conference talks for MP3 players or iPods also for free. You can listen to a conference talk on your MP3 player while doing other work as you prepare a Family Home Evening lesson.

The gospel art picture kit contains pictures you can use for Family Home Evening. You can print these pictures or copy and paste them into a handout. These pictures also include a summary of the topic, which can be very useful for children's talks or for part of a lesson. You can also print off an agenda and fill in the information. Then a family member can conduct and announce what is going to happen next.

For family home evening treats you can check out the kitchen krafts section of the Friend. There are endless possibilities for family home evenings from lds.org and from church magazines.

Other great resources are Seminary and Institute Manuals. You can get these at the LDS distribution center, at the Institute,or on-line.

President Hinkley said in his closing remarks one conference:
We hope that you will use the May edition of the Church magazines as a text for your family home evenings, to review that which has been spoken in this conference. What has been said by each of the speakers represents his or her prayerful attempt to impart knowledge that will inspire and cause all who have heard it to stand a little taller and be a little better” (President Hinkley, Ensign, May 2007, p. 105).