Happy teaching! Remember, God’s work is often the most challenging BUT the most rewarding in the end. Getting through a quick lesson may feel hard and at times impossible, but the blessings will come and they will make it SO worth all the struggle!
It’s been two weeks since we picked up our chickens and we are super excited about it! As if we don’t have enough on our plates with gardens, homeschool, extracurricular activities, home renovations and callings in our church we figured why not add one more thing. 🙂
It didn’t take a long to understand why people talk about “chicken math”. These little cuties are so fun and entertaining not to mention how stinking cute they are!
They do really smell though, that part is less fun. It will all pay off though! Everyone in the family got to name one so here was our final choices: Dutton Roxie Cody Daisy Potter Clara Summer Rosie
Taylor lost interest in them pretty quickly but the dogs are still super curious. With that being said, they have never done anything alarming; they just look into their cage and hold perfectly still. When we have them on our lap or holding them down for the dogs to see they come lay right next to us and smell without getting too close. Don’t get me wrong, they are not ready to be trusted with them but it’s a better start than I thought it would be
I don’t have any updated photos yet but they have gotten SO big already in TWO weeks! It’s crazy! They don’t snuggle in our hands as much as they use to but we enjoyed it while it lasted:
Roxie is still the most friendly and most of them still tolerate being held and if you put them down by you they’ll come climb on you. I am really excited to start getting them out of their cage more and give them a safe place in the backyard for a little bit each day. Heaven knows they’re not going to get too cold in our weather. 😉
I’ll have to post pics of their new home as soon as we have it finished, and updated pics of how big they are getting. We know we still have a lot to learn as we go on this journey but we’re so excited for this new adventure. As we continue to expand our little homestead with chickens and gardens and become more self sufficient we are filled with gratitude for the freedoms we have to live our life this way. We sure are blessed!
As always the items for the week that are needed are: CFM manual (or Gospel Library app), Old Testament and journals (highly recommended). The Beginner’s Bible is also highly recommended but by no means mandatory to do these lessons. We also have the Don’t Miss It: Old Testament Posters which we introduce each Monday and then review on Sundays which the word often coming up in our discussions throughout the week but this also is not a mandatory item to have.
I always recommend that you read through each lesson at the beginning of each week to see about any preparation that is needed for that week. There rarely is much to do but occasionally there is a little work to be done. This month I start assigning some of the older kids certain assignments such as reading through a talk prior to that day’s lesson and ask them to be prepared to share a summary of the talk and their thoughts on it with us. So keep an eye out for those opportunities if you so choose.
HERE is the video, My Kingdom is Not of This World mentioned as a part of the FHE lesson for this week. I plan on telling this kids on Monday of this week that later this week we’ll be sharing our favorite song about Christ if they would like to take some time this week to listen to some songs of Christ and be ready to share.
I know this is way late but I read so many great books in July that I had to still document it somewhere.
Just As Long As We’re Together by Judy Blume was a “meh” for me. Probably 3 stars. It wasn’t bad at all but there was nothing great about it either. I wanted to try one of her books because I had heard good things for teenagers but I’m not dying to read another book or recommend this one even to my girls. I’m all about books that are entertaining AND add some great value/education/lessons and this book was pure fluff in my opinion.
The Sister Preachers was interesting, I definitely enjoyed it, but as with most Deseret Bookshelf books, I wouldn’t give it more than a 4 star. I highly recommend reading the book if you’re going to, I found the audio bothering me enough that maybe that’s part of why I didn’t LOVE the book? I don’t know exactly what it was for me. I felt pretty similar to Hannah. I did enjoy it and found it very interesting but sometimes hearing some of the characters sound like girls from this day and age through me for a loop at times. Strong 4 stars though because I did love the educational factor.
1776 is such a fascinating book. You have to love history to probably get super into it, it is not a story just straight facts but it was fun to listen to again. Recommend the audio for sure!
Now for the rest of the books: I LOVED THEM. The War I Finally Won, All the Lonely People, The Sun Does Shine, The Things We Cannot Say, Star Girl, America’s First Daughter and Rent Collector are all fantastic books that I highly recommend. We listened to Rent Collector – student edition as a family and we all loved it. FANTASTIC lessons and the kids would ask for us to turn it back on as soon as we got in the car…that’s always a good sign! All of these books were a perfect balance of educational, entertaining and inspiring. Highly recommend all of them!
As always, the needed items are Bible and CFM manual but journals and Gospel Library App are highly recommended. The Beginner’s Bible is also highly recommended for families with young children or very short amounts of time to do lessons/discussions.
As always the items needed are the Come Follow Me – Old Testament manual and your scriptures; journals are used frequently in our house as well but not mandatory.
The Beginner’s Bible is another highly recommended tool which helps us get a great summary quickly for kids with short attention spans.
During FHE for this week I do have for us to read through My First Book of Temples that I got from Desert Book way back in the day but any additional reading or looking at pictures would work great or skip altogether.
Lessons are every other day during the summer in our household.
As always the only mandatory items are the Old Testament and the CFM manual whether that be a hard copy or on the Gospel Library app (recommended method), however, journals are highly recommended.
Although not mandatory The Beginner’s Bible is also highly recommended as we use it frequently and have found it to be an amazing resource to get to the point quickly and clearly. Fantastic for families with littles as well as families short on time.
Although we do not have Walking with Women of the Old Testament on the plans for any week this month, I do plan on reading through Ruth, Naomi, and Hannah with the kids throughout the month. Often time we spend some time on Sundays diving deeper into their stories/history.
Not as much reading this month as I would’ve liked but we read a BUNCH of books in school, so if I counted all of those it would’ve been 7 books this month. It’s amazing how much our brains can hold at once and keep track of!
Can’t wait for May reviews cause I’m reading some amazing books so far! Happy Mother’s Day weekend!
This month starts off the same as usual but the last week of the month you will notice we change it quite a bit. We begin our summer schedule that week and as much as I should maybe try to do CFM still everyday I also really don’t feel bad that we don’t. 🙂
As always the weekly items we use are our Old Testament, the Come Follow Me (CFM) manual, and our journals. Although I have the manual pictures above we don’t use it often, we use the Gospel Library app because it’s so much easier to access the links to scripture, videos and more. Not pictured is the Don’t Miss It Word of the Week posters that we use. We introduce the word every Monday and review every Sunday as well as discuss throughout the week when we notice something that helps us better understand why that word must have been chosen.
We also frequently use The Beginner’s Bible. We occasionally use Walking with the Women of the Old Testament in our CFM lessons but more times than not we use that book for additional reading on Sundays outside of CFM. The Color Your Way Through the Old Testament is a book our youngest uses to keep herself busy while we do the lessons (sometimes our youngest 2) but we never have it incorporated into the lessons.
First week of May: WEEK 19
A pretty straight forward week with minimum amount of prep work needed.
We do use some of the “extra materials” this week with The Beginner’s Bible and Walking with the Women of the Old Testament both being used for lessons. There also is the potential of some prep work needing to be put into the FHE lesson depending on what you choose to use.
HERE is the link for the video mentioned for Thursday’s lesson.
FHE will take a little prep with cutting out some hearts for the lesson but that is it. I labeled mine already for the sake of showing an example but I personally will not label the others and let the kids do them as they choose. Sunday may take a little prep work, or at least thinking/planning in advance, depending on what nice thing you want to do for your family. Day to day CFM lessons take no prep work.
There is another “Thoughts to Keep in Mind…” at the beginning of this weeks CFM section that you may want to read through and highlight parts you want to share with your family throughout the week. Other than that, I’m going to say no prep work for this week unless you want to put together a way for your family to memorize a scripture in advance. I plan on the kids coming up with their own way of memorizing and doing the work themselves but it’s up to you. We do use The Beginner’s Bible throughout the week again but it is not mandatory. It is a great option if you have little kids though or even just short time frames to do these lessons in; they really do a great job getting to the moral of the story and keeping it short and sweet.
This is the beginning of our summer schedule so we’ll only be doing CFM every other day and even then I keep them extra short…lots of reading from The Beginner’s Bible I want to make sure we don’t just give up on CFM for 2 months but I also want to be realistic with what we can get done with our summer schedule. No prep work needed this week.
May you enjoy your CFM experience with your family and remember they are getting SOMETHING out of it, even if it doesn’t always feel like it in the moment! Hang in there and don’t give up, it’s more important now than ever to make sure we’re giving our kids all the tools possible to stay strong in their faith. You’ve got this, parents!
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