The purpose of this lesson is to make sure our kids know what our prophet said during general conference. I have taken the most important, key points and broken them down into kid-sized bites.
Begin your lesson by singing “Follow the Prophet” from the Primary Children’s Songbook.
For this lesson, I have once again used a power point presentation; I like this mode of teaching because I can use ANY picture from the internet with zero printing costs and the pictures are huge and captivating. I use chrome cast to cast my entire desktop to my TV. I know I may be a little behind technologically so if this method isn’t working for you and you have a better option for me…. I’d love to hear it.
When using this power point or any power point from my other lessons, keep in mind that the text and writing is there for a guideline of what to talk about. You should read through it beforehand and make sure you fully understand each topic and would be comfortable answering questions and expounding. You should also work to make it age appropriate and family specific to your family and their ages. Do research as necessary to be prepared for the best experience and for the optimal opportunity for the Spirit to guide your lessons. I took my information from President Nelson’s talk, “Come, Follow Me”.
The beginning of the power point is meant as a reminder of the previous lesson where we prepared them for general conference. See if they recognize the prophet and go over his name a few times. The next slide has pictures of our Follow the Prophet activity which can be found in this lesson. I use this slide to remind them of the importance of following the prophet to the “treat” of eternal life. (You can use your own pictures or delete these slides, just download the power point and save a version onto your computer. Then you’ll be able to change it as needed.) Next, a picture of general conference pops us and I remind them that we just listened to our prophet on the TV and he told us what Heavenly Father told him to teach us. He told us how to get the “treat” of living in Heaven. Do you know what he said? NO? That’s alright because I’m going to teach you right now.
The next slides go through President Nelson’s experience of losing his daughter to cancer but how he knows he will see her again. He teaches that not everyone will get the wonderful “treat” of living with their family in heaven, only those who DO what Jesus teaches so they can qualify for the power of the priesthood to seal their family together. He was very blunt about this; even though it may be hard for your child to hear, we need to teach them. President Nelson focused on making covenants through baptism and the temple; this is how we qualify for the power of the Priesthood to seal us together as families. The final slide compares the priesthood to glue; this leads into the activity portion.
Activity: Cotton ball Family
For the activity, you will need cotton balls, glue, card-stock and markers. Begin by having each member of the family pull out enough cotton balls to represent each person in your family. We have 5 members in our family, so each person will get 5 cotton balls. Go through and name each cotton ball as you point to them. This is Dad; pick him up and hold him in your hand. This is Mom; pick her up and hold her tight with Dad. Keep adding family members until each person is holding a fist full of the whole “family”. Then talk about how much you love each other and want to be together forever. Squeeze the balls together as tight as you can and see if you can make the balls stick together. Once you feel they are strong and stuck together, throw the ball up into the air as high as you can “to reach heaven” and let it fall. Did your family stay together? No? But you squished them together with all your strength! What else might we need to keep these cotton balls together? Show a bottle of glue and remind them, this represents the Priesthood.
Have each person draw “heaven” on their piece of white card-stock; use things that represent the idea of heaven. I chose to draw a bright sun, a rainbow and lots of smiley faces. Then glue your family of cotton balls tightly together somewhere in heaven. I put a circle around mine and wrote “Family”. Hang these pictures up on the fridge or in their rooms and discuss throughout the week. A bonus for our family is that my nephew is getting baptized this Saturday. So we will be able to talk about how he is DOING what Jesus has asked him to do and getting some of the POWER he needs to be with his family forever.
Birdlings 