Family nights

My friend Michelle's posts on family night at her house encouraged me to dig out my Heritage Builders series books and do the same. We LOVE the devotional activities. Since we are "in between" churches right now we needed this set time to focus on teaching and worship together in a way that is not just mom and dad reading the bible while little ones wiggle and wonder when they can get up! We still read the Word...but this gives the kids a way to be excited about learning!

I have turned a corner in my parenting where I seek less to force them to be still and silent when learning about God, to where I want them to interact and ENJOY learning about God. I do not want their memories to be of bad times when we are reading the Word or doing "church". With our family nights, there is an abundance of fun loving times and they are actually remembering the lessons much better this way!

Here are some shots of our last few times! I have not taken photos every time and I am not going to post this weekly. I am usually too wrapped up in what we are going to get many shots! I just thought I would post a few pics of the last 2 to encourage you to get out there and have fun while learning about the amazing things God has done!

After we read about Creation, we made play dough together and everyone got time to try making the things of Creation! It could be animals, plants or whatever else they remembered from the bible reading. Yes, we did end up with some dinosaurs!





Making homemade pizza together





















Animals!










Daddy LOVES these times! He is eagerly in the middle of every activity! Here he is making play dough animals!







Daddy hanging up the "stars" for the days of Creation.












Everyone got into the homemade tent and imagined being "In the beginning". We had the sound of water, lights going on and off, dirt going around for land...it was really fun.
Each time begins with prayer and reading the selected part of scripture that goes with the lesson and also ends in a time for each person to pray about whatever is on their heart.

Pizza time!

The last one we did...I did not get very many pictures. We went to a huge field and measured out the Ark. Wow, it was HUGE. Then, the kids had races up and down to "feed the animals". Only the Philosopher was able to run the whole distance more than once...everyone else was bushed!

Then, they made an ark at home and put animals in it, decorated it etc.

Here is a shot of the filed before we started measuring things out. Sorry there are not more pictures of the "animal feeding" that was hilarious!