What does it take to have a successful FHE?

Check out this blogger's post titled 10 Commandments to Having a Successful Family Home Evening

FHE lesssons from ldsfamilyfun

I received an email today from living scriptures with an idea for a FHE lesson on Loyalty. --I am pretty sure that this website may become a new favorite resource for some of my family home evening lessons. --The website has many more lesson ideas on topics of modern prophets, church history, Book of Mormon, New Testament, Old Testament, and even some lessons on hero classics, like Benjamin Franklin and Harriet Tubman. Check the entire list of lesson ideas out here. 

New Family Home Evening Website

If you haven't checked out the new changes to lds.org yet, you really should!! Especially check out the new link for Family Home Evening. It includes a clip from Elder Bednar's talk in the October 2009 conference on 'Consistency being the key'.  This talk has been really helpful to me ever since I heard Elder Bednar give it, and has always remained in my mind when like Elder Bednar, I "wondered if our efforts to do these spiritually essential things were worthwhile" or "because the righteous habits we worked so hard to foster did not seem to yield immediately the spiritual results we wanted and expected."

Elder Bednar's entire talk: More Diligent and Concerned at Home

A Recipe for 'Sweet' Family Home Evenings

**Found the following here the other day, and thought I would share it with you!!**

A Recipe for 'Sweet' Family Home Evenings

Six Essential Ingredients

1. A Pinch of Prayer - Always start and end with a prayer. The old saying is still true, "The family that prays together stays together!"

2. Add a Good Lesson - Children tend to stay focused if the lesson grabs and keeps their attention.

3. Pour In a Flavor of Fun - A fun activity during or after the lesson will keep your children looking forward to your weekly family home evenings.

4. Stir Quickly - Keep your lessons short. A good rule of thumb is that you have about one minute of attention span for every year of the child's age. A ten year-old has about 10 minutes of good attention span.

5. Add Something Sweet - It's always fun to have refreshments. Family members can take turns preparing something delicious for after the lesson

6. Stir In Lots of Love - This is what children need most. It's what families provide best! If children know they are loved they will feel safe and content. (And don't forget patience. Remember, they're just kids!)

Helpful Articles/Documents for Planning FHE

For our last Primary activity, we decided to do a little something special to promote Family Home Evening in each of the children's homes. Thanks to still having a large amount of money in our budget, we decided to purchase a board game for each of the familes in our Primary (which is about 15 families). So, at the party each family was given a board game to take home, along with a FHE packet that we put together of informational Ensign articles, quotes on FHE, etc.  The packet contained the following:

*A copy of The Family: A Proclamation to the World
*Various Quotes from previous First Presidencies on Family Home Evening
*Ensign Article: Four Tips for Family Night
*Family Home Evening/Keep It Simple
*Ensign Article: Family Home Evening Suggestion Box
*200 + LDS FHE Ideas (Taken from MormonShare.com: 100+ LDS FHE Ideas)
*Planning FHE for the Year
*Family Home Evening Agenda

These are all really helpful in planning and organizing your Family Home Evening Lessons. The document Family Home Evening/Keep It Simple suggests to "Have a Plan" with what you are going to do each week. I decided to do this and have started trying to plan for my FHE lessons based on the following schedule:

Week 1: Lesson based on the Monthly Primary Theme
Week 2: Lesson based on a story from the Scriptures
Week 3: Lesson based on any Gospel Principle
Week 4: Have a Game Night/Movie Night
(If occurs) Week 5: Lesson on another Gospel Principle
**Plan on having a special Holiday lesson the week of any given holiday**

So, far this has worked and has made it easier to plan a lesson. My goal is to try to plan at least a month in advance what each lesson will be, so I won't be hurrying to find something the night of FHE.  I have found in the past that when I don't have something planned, we don't do FHE, we miss a week, then it turns into another missed week, and so forth.  Sure this does take a little work, but in the end it makes it easier to be consistent with our Family Home Evenings. Just an idea you might want to consider to if consistency is a problem your family has too!!