Heart Scotch - Love at Home FHE Lesson

How many of you fought with your brothers and sisters?  I'm sure you were all perfect children.  Well, I wasn't.  I remember getting into a couple "heated conversations" with my siblings.  Many times during these arguments, my mom would come up behind us and start singing "Love at Home."  When I got older my siblings and I would roll our eyes, but it is hard to keep fighting when that song is sung.  In fact, it helped me let go of the anger and forgive quickly.  That memory has stuck with me throughout the years.

I wanted to teach my children ways we can show love in the home and that if our feelings are hurt we need to forgive quickly.  Nephi is a great scripture hero to teach your children about.  He "frankly forgives" his brothers many times.  I read my kids a story from the March The Friend magazine called Big Brother Trap.  (Once it comes up online I will post the link.)  It talks about a girl whose feelings had been hurt by her big brother.  So, she set up a trap - a water bucket above the shed to dump on his head - and waited to get him all wet.  She has opportunities to let her anger go, but she won't back down.  When her brother comes out she drenches him.  She feels victorious until she notices that he has been working in the shed to fix her bike.  She learns about the importance of quickly forgiving.  I explained to my kids that if your feelings have been hurt, you need to let your anger go and forgive or you will only be holding yourself back from moving on.

I then told the kids that we want to have loving, happy feelings in our home.  We talked about some ways we can do that.  One thing that I really wanted to encourage is giving compliments or saying nice things about members of the family.  We did this by playing a game I call heart-scotch.  It is just like hopscotch only the squares are hearts and inside each heart is the name of a member of the family.

Princess started the game for us.  She threw the beanbag.

After a couple of tries, it landed on dad.

She then said one thing she likes about her daddy.  Once she did, she could hop over...

Pick up the beanbag, finish hopping on the hearts, and pass the beanbag off to someone else.  We played the game a couple of times giving everyone a few turns.  This gave us a change to compliment everyone in the family.  We finished the game feeling closer.

Once everyone was done playing the game, we played with chalk.  Bud and Goofy had fun decorating my heart-scotch board.

Goofy said she was making "my own hearts."

Princess made a heart-scotch board of her own.

She was pretty proud of it.

Goofy liked trying out both heart-scotch boards.

The part of Princess' heart-scotch game that touched me most was her final heart.  It says, "I Love Jesus."

What are some ways you like to show love in your home?

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