Spiritual Crocodiles FHE, the story of Jacob and Sherem

When I started "getting serious" about FHE'S last year I wanted to pick a theme every year and focus on lessons that somehow incorporated that theme. Last year it seemed to work out pretty well, so this year I thought I would focus on Book of Mormon stories and well it hasn't gone as smoothly as I had hoped :) I have been a little more layed back, with vacations and slacking off at the beginning of the year I feel like I am STILL playing catch up, blah!! Its seriously time to buck up and put some lessons together Nikki.... However lucky for me my amazing friend Tonii has put together a few lessons while we were on vacation and they just happen to be Book of Mormon stories .. :) YAY!!! Thank you times a BIZILLION girl..... go check out her post, she always has free printables!! LOVE LOVE LOVE HER for that:).... (http://ptskjohnson.blogspot.com/2013/04/spiritual-crocodiles-family-home.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FvdltM+%28Blue+Skies+Ahead%29 )

PRAYER: Ryker
SONG: Book of Mormon stories (the boys got a kick out of me singing the song and doing the actions.. Since they didn't know it very well it was pretty much a solo, I seem to do lots of those around here ;)

Today's lesson was on the story of Jacob and Sherem..  We read the story in *Jacob 7. Since the chapter is about 3 pages long I decided to read through it and highlight the most important verses.. After I read a few of the versus I highlighted to the kids, we got out our "My first Book of Mormon stories" book and read the summarized story in there.. It took about 15 min to get through the story, then we talked about all of the sneaky way's Sherem "tricked" people into following him. We talked about how Sherem used "flattery" to lead the people away from Christ. The scriptures said that Sherem was a "well learned" man and that he used his "knowledge of the language" and his "power of speech" to get people to question their beliefs.. When we were talking with the kids about these things we/they came up with the words "tricky", "sneaky" and "nice guy" to describe Sherem :) , I love that they came up with these words on there own, so I went along with it...


Love this book :)

We then talked about and compared,  Crocodiles and Spiritual Crocodiles.. I asked the kids if Croc's are "tricky", "sneaky" and or "nice".. We came to the conclusion that we didn't know if they are "tricky" but we did know that they can be "sneaky" and they can disguise themselves very well.. Much like "spiritual croc's" actual crocs disguise themselves and sneak up on their prey.. They work slow at first but then all of the sudden they are RIGHT THERE and *S-N-A-T-C-H* they take a bite out of our testimony, sometimes before we even saw them coming... :)... (Dugi got a little scared when I yelled snatch and said the croc took a bite out of him.. haha) I then asked the kids if they think "Croc's are nice?", the kids were hesitant to answer that (because they bite) but Ryker came to the conclusion that they are nice as long as they aren't hungry, and I'm good with that answer:) I asked Ryker if the picture of the Crocodiles on our little Croc cards was "nice" or "mean", he said "nice" because the Croc is smiling... By then the kids were starting to get antsy so I quickly explained that sometimes things aren't always what they seem to be at first glance.. Just because something looks "nice" or "good" doesn't mean that it actually is.. I told the kids that we/they need to be careful of Spiritual Croc's, because if we arent, they can "sneak" up on us and take small bites (or big ones) out of our testimonies..... (Ryker later came to me and told me that our testimonies are "Light" like Jesus and when the Croc gets ahold of us and takes a "bite" it turns that part "dark/black" like Satan.. I was a little surprised that he had been thinking so much about the lesson but I told him that he was right.. I asked if there was anyway to turn the "dark" patch back to "light" once the Croc had gotten ahold of it, he thought about it for a while and then said "no", so we quickly had a "mini lesson" on repentance and being able to be "whole, or full of light again" :O)

the kids then got to go around the room and find all of the little crocodiles I had hidden (AKA taped to obvious places in the living room).. we read them all pretty fast and the kids started to put 2 and 2 together on how easy it is to let little Crocs sneak into our lives on a daily basis..

We finished off the night with CUPCAKES and the kids and I couldn't have been happier :)


I intended to take a few pictures but of course i hadn't charged the camera since being home from the cruise, which means, YEP its dead :)