the hatchling place

thankful post-its

 

thanksgiving week is here, so i thought i'd share our thankful wall that's been going on by our kitchen table. 

all we did was draw a poster that says "we are thankful" and in the middle of the table i always leave markers & a stack of post-it notes for people to write their gratitude items on.  then we stick them on up there.

super easy & super wonderful to see what my girls put.  my 6 year old is especially into it, she adds a few every day. 

i've always thought it'd be neat to make a big tree & add huge leaves on it with their thank-yous on that, but that takes prep-time & it seems that prep-time & me don't mix so well :)  this one is my easy, no prep-time alternative.

ceiling plan of salvation- part 4

 

part 4 focuses on death and how our bodies stay on earth while our spirits return back to heaven.  to review this part i did the good old hand & glove demonstration.  i grabbed a mitten for everyone so that they could do it with me. 

if you've never heard of it it goes something like this.....your hand represents your spirit and your glove represents your body.  you can demonstrate how your spirit (hand) was in heaven & when it came to earth it received a body (put the glove on).   when we die we take our body (glove) off and it remains on earth, while our spirit (hand) goes back up to heaven.  i think i was taught this as a kid, but to me it is so perfect and children can understand it.

while talking about this it was wonderful to ask them questions about why our bodies are so important and the things we can do that we can not if were just spirits.  to me, this is laying a foundation for them to respect their bodies in the future.

for the ceiling.....have each child draw a big picture of themselves on card stock.   i also had one of them draw a picture of the earth.  i then took thick transparent paper & traced the pictures they had drawn of themselves.  cut everything out. 

tape the pictures of themselves onto the earth (to represent how their body stays on the earth after death) and hang the earth up with string.  then hangthe transparent body cut-outs up above the earth, i also took one of our stars from heaven & hung it up above the earth. (to represent how our spirits go back up to heaven.)

*as a side note.....i love my 3 year old's drawing and it's super long hair, oh how she wants her hair to grow out long!

ceiling plan of salvation- part 3

 

part 3 focuses on our earth life. 

i gave everyone a piece of cardstock paper & set markers in the middle.  i helped them guess the things that we need to do during our earth life.  ours were: be baptized, go to the temple for our endowment, be sealed in the temple & live the gospel.  this gave me the opportunity to talk about the need for & the difference between our endowment & our temple sealing.  and also the importance of our everyday living of the gospel. 

we each picked one of these to draw a picture of.  now i happened to have a styrofoam ball around & i spray painted it blue to represent the earth.  i cut out our pictures & taped them to tooth picks.  then i stuck them into the earth ball & i also stuck one of those eye hooks on the top of the ball & then hung it up with string. 

(i had all this stuff at home already from other projects, so if you don't have time to get all that, you could just have your kids draw a picture of the earth or better yet, use the picture of the earth in the gospel art kit & tape their pictures onto that)

ceiling plan of salvation- part 2

 

i wanted to make it clear that our Savior is an integral part of the plan of salvation.  i love using the word integral here because one of the definitions of integral is "necessary to the completeness of the whole."  and that is exactly what we need our children to understand. 

so step 2 of our ceiling plan of salvation is focused on our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

for the lesson part, i passed the buck & asked my husband to talk to the girls about it.  i loved what he did though.  he told them a story and had 2 of my girls act out the story with dolls.  he told the "parable of the bicycle" from the book "Believing Christ" by Stephen E. Robinson.  at first i wasn't sure if my girls were old enough to understand, but in the end i really felt that they got it.

for the ceiling part we took 3 gospel art kit pictures & taped them together to make a mobile.  i used a picture of the Savior being baptized, in the Garden of Gethsemene, and the Savior's resurrection.  we taped them together in a triangle & hung it with string. 

ceiling plan of salvation- part 1

 

it has been made clear to me that i need to teach the plan of salvation (or the plan of happiness) over & over.  this has become my favorite way.  i will post it in sections because it takes several small sections of time to do. 

we are teaching the plan of salvation in sections....before life, our Savior's plan, earth life, death, resurrection, & eternity.  we are making things that represent these sections to hang in order from the ceiling.  ours is in the playroom, which happens to be right off our kitchen & family room, so we see it all the time.

part 1- before life

you will need card stock paper, markers, scissors, ribbon/string, tacs/tape (to hang from the ceiling).  talk about our pre-earth life and the events that happened there.  i started by simply reading the first chapter of the children's Old Testament Stories, making sure to stress the points that i felt were important. 

then we colored images that represented our pre-earth life.  we have several star shapes & a sun.    then we cut them out, taped them to ribbon and hung them in a corner of our playroom.  the entire ceiling plan of salvation will go diagonal across the room.