I had to pull together a last-minute FHE lesson after dinner last night. I usually will find a Friend article, in these situations, and read the article and discuss it. So as I was flipping through the Friend, I found a nice short article on prayer. It was about a couple of kids who used prayer in their lives. The article also had some activities that you could do to help re-inforce the message. One of these had an activity to find examples of prayer in the scriptures, but a better idea came to me and it turned out really well.
I asked my son to get the "blue box" of Church pictures. I put the box in the middle of the floor. Then, before I read the article, I told the kids that I was going to start a sentence and I wanted them to finish it. I started the sentence, "Prayer is ..." They each came up with their ideas ... beautiful, reverent, talking to God, quiet. Then I read the article. We talked about it a bit and then each of them wanted to share their own experiences with personal prayer and so we all listend to their personal experiences.
Then we all sat on the floor around the "blue box." I split the pictures up between everyone in the family. I then asked them to put the pictures that dealt with prayer in one pile and then put all the other pictures in another pile. Then I took all their non-prayer pictures and put them back in the box. Then I showed them how many scripture story pictures were about prayer. I quickly went through each one; briefly recounting the story or having one of the kids recount the story. Then I asked them, "was their prayer answered?" Of course they were! And just seeing all the stories in the scriptures and talking about how those prayers were answered not only helped the kids, but it really strengthened my faith too.
