Toddler Home Evening
About the time a child turns one or two, parents start to suspect they ought to be having a family home evening devoted to the learning needs of their newest family member. However, the child is so little and may not even talk yet! How do you teach a child so young?
The Sunbeam manual is a great starting point for ideas. This manual was written for children ages eighteen months to three years of age. The lessons are online at LDS.org in the Gospel Library. Check the end of each lesson, which has adaptations for younger children. Even if you choose not to teach those lessons, you might want to incorporate the ideas for younger children, the crafts and the finger plays. The Friend has a section for the littlest readers. Collect these and make a file by topic so you can find the ones you want.
Many parents use the scripture readers as their lesson for family home evening. Read one story from the scriptures, add a finger play, a song and a craft or game and you have a simple family home evening. Following are some examples:
Nephi Builds a Boat: Read the story. Sing Nephi's Courage (found in the Children's Song Book used in Primary). Retell the story using flannel board pictures. Let your child play with the figures and help you tell the story. Play with toy boats in a big pan of water or the sink. Make banana splits and pretend they are boats.
Jesus Loves Me: Read the stories from the Bible and Book of Mormon about Jesus and the children. Give your child the picture from the Primary 2 manual, lesson 19. This is a picture of Jesus with children that your child can color. (It doesn't matter if he just scribbles it.) The children's faces are blank, so your child can add happy faces if he chooses, or you can draw them for him. You can also cut out a picture of your child's head and glue it to one of the children in the picture. The same lesson has a finger play about children and Jesus. Teach it to your child. Sing a song about Jesus, such as "Tell Me the Stories of Jesus." Go for a walk and look for wonderful things Jesus gave the children of the world.
Noah's ark: Read the story. Play together with toy animals or with pictures of animals from a flannel board set or from coloring books. Cut out the animals in advance and draw an ark on poster board. (You don't have to be an artist to do this. Toddlers don't care.) Act out the story. If you have two of each animal, let your child match the animals, and teach something scholastic at the same time. Eat animal crackers for your snack. Pretend to be animals. On the weekend, visit an animal shelter, the zoo or a farm.
As you can see, these are very simple little lessons based around a scripture story. They take very little time to prepare but your child will love doing them. If you need help adapting lessons to your child's age, ask his church teacher for suggestions. She knows all about teaching children your child's age!
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