MOORE LIKE A ZOO!!: A Lesson Toe Be Learned!

Every Monday....ok, not EVERY Monday, but MOST Monday nights, in our home, we hold a Family Home Evening. We sing songs and pray. We play and dance. We do spotlights and tell each other all the reasons we love each other. We have treats, wrestle, tickle, giggle, play hind-n-seek and chase each other around the house.

We sometimes go off-site and take walks through the park, or slide down the slides, or swing on the swings. We even sometimes just drive around in circles through neighborhoods we are unfamiliar with and admire the beautiful landscaping, or "moo" at the cows, or ride our bikes together. Sometimes we feed the ducks, or run from the ducks, or step in duck poop. But with every FHE, there is a lesson.

Some are lessons from scripture, such as the the story of Esther's courage to go, unsummoned, before the King to save her people; or the story of Noah's obedience to build a ship when there was not yet any rain coming down; or the story of the Brother of Jared who not only took his problems to the Lord, but also provided his own ideas of how he felt the Lord could solve those problems in a way that would strengthen his own faith.

Other times we have lessons about things such as learning to share or having good manners, or how two people working together can accomplish a job faster than when one person does it alone.

Well, doing this is a challenge because it requires a new lesson each week, and for those of you who have children, you know what a challenge that can be.

So, some time ago, I started trying to teach these lessons using puppets, because what child doesn't pay attention to puppets? Right? Well, it has been very successful in the past, and we have done quite a few lessons this way. The way we know it works, is that almost every time we do one this way, the children each want to have their turn trying to do the puppet show, and almost every time, they give the very same lesson that they had just learned.......in a simplified format of course and with a lot of poetic license.

Recently, we were a bit rushed to finish up the lesson part of FHE, because we still wanted to go get ice cream for a treat, and still get the kids in bed at a reasonable time, but we hadn't had a lesson yet, and I found myself utterly unprepared for one. We always have plenty of material to teach, based upon things we observe in our family's daily lives. At that particular time, we had been struggling with helping our daughter to know about being nice. So I came up with an impromptu way of teaching the lesson of being nice to each other, and of course it had to involve puppets of some sort, but where our traditional puppets were, I did not know. so I improvised. The pictures below tell the rest of the story.

Enjoy! :)