Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday Centers
We tried something new today, which was a big success. I got the idea from my brother and his wife who took it from the March 2009 Friend. You set up a few areas in the house with fun Sunday-appropriate activities for the kids. We spent ten minutes at each station, which was perfect for our group of two families - two kids per group.
I was happy that it wasn’t hard to set this up. As soon as I mentioned the idea to the girls and asked Natalie to set up the letter-writing/drawing station, she and Amy got all jazzed about it and made signs for each station, found all the materials, and couldn’t wait to explain them to their cousins and assign the groups. That was cool.
We chose four stations today:
Our goal has always been for Sundays to be a FUN day. I also feel really strongly about keeping the Sabbath Day holy. Since there are plenty of “don’ts” for Sundays, we have tried to provide many Sunday “do’s” so the kids don’t get bored or dislike this special day.
There have been times when a child has groaned “I don’t like Sundays” or “Sundays are boring.” That’s when we’ve had to step it up and figure out ways to provide a lot of fun activities for the kids to do. They love watching Sunday movies, home movies, FHE DVDs (made by my mom), playing Sunday games, reading Sunday books, and going on walks. I liked the one-on-one time today, facilitated by the centers. Besides the sugar cookie decorating, the centers only took 40 minutes. An hour is definitely do-able. There is still a lot to improve on to make our Sundays better, but I’m really happy with today. The Sunday Centers are definitely worth repeating!
1 - Making sugar cookies
We delivered two plates to neighbors and enjoyed the rest.
2 - Computer games at lds.org
This was a BIG favorite!
3 - Reading (The Friend magazine)
4 - Letter-Writing
The kids really loved having Jon read to them.
The kids loved this one, too. Special stickers made it extra fun.
The sugar cookies ended up being really time-intensive (‘cause we had to frost them after baking). That was okay with me since today was a holiday and all.
