Enter: Lauren, making your life easier.
We have crashed into the end of all things school, sports, project, graduation, and parties. In my case, only to figure out that it’s all beginning again. Summer activities, camps, VBS, and wait for it…sports.
Each summer in an attempt to remind us of the important things I set up a verse a week for us to talk about, meditate on, and memorize. This morning. when I announced that this summer is no different, I was met with less than excited stares, and you know what…I don’t care. My job is not to make them independent like most parents assume, but to transfer their dependence from me to God. They will enjoy it as we go, they always do. In the meantime, my job is to provide the discipline.
So, in the interest of making your life easier, I am providing the guide I am using for you again this summer. If you’ve done this with me for years, you may find some of the verses are familiar. I’m circling around and using some repeats this year. It will be good for my heart as well as theirs. I hope you enjoy.
This guide is completely free and good for all ages. There are different activities and or even color sheets for the verse suggested for pre-K through high school.
At our house, we print out each week of questions for my kids to answer and they have fun illustrating the verse some way, painting it, using one of the color sheets I've added for each week, making it out of Legos, coming up with a song; it is easily adaptable for different ages and varying personalities. My older kids now like to race to see who can say it first, or learn it before Dad. When my kids were too young to write, I printed the verse out for them and they glued it in their journals and colored it. These are just a suggestions, the only rule is to not hold this rigidly. I repeat: make it work for your family!
We always write the verse on our big chalkboard so that it’s in front of us all week. If you don’t have a chalkboard display the kids verses on the refrigerator. My older kids like to display theirs on the bathroom mirrors so they can read and work on memorizing the verses while they brush their teeth. There are tons of ways you can tweak these ideas.
Some ages will need more help than others, but this is totally doable for preschool through high school. Admittedly, the high schoolers may not want to do the color sheets, or they just might. Figure out how it works for your family. You can write the verse in their journal on Monday, pray it on Tuesday, answer questions on Wednesday, illustrate it on Thursday, and play a memory game with it on Friday. Do something different the next week. Take a copy of the verse and put it in the car to memorize together when in the drive-thru line. Let them come up with a prize for memorizing it. There are so many ways to tailor this to your individual family. One year we even ordered temporary tattoos of our verses!
If you'd like to receive this summer family plan,
click on the button below for your free download.
No catch, it's completely free. I'd love it if you want to subscribe,
but you can download the plan either way.