From Jeff Anderson:
It has been wonderful this year to partake of President Hinckley’s challenge to read the Book of Mormon. We have received some great blessings and the spirit in our home has increased overall as we’ve read together as a family. However, along with the blessings in our home we have had some challenges as well as we have tried to follow the counsel of our prophet.
We have three beautiful girls (ages 8,6,and 4) who we try to read the scriptures with every night. We used to read the scripture story books but a while ago decided just to read the “real” scriptures and explain them as we go. This works well if we are flexible. Some days the girls can sit still for 30 minutes and listen and learn. Some days their attention span is significantly less. If my wife and I had sat down in the beginning and set out a schedule to finish on time we probably would not have run into the problem we did. It worked fine for me to have spurts of reading rather than read 1.7 pages per day for the entire time but the girls don’t hold up well when we have to read 5 pages a day to catch up.
Despite our shortcomings as planners our girls have gained a better understanding this year of the Book of Mormon and the testimony its prophets bear of our Savior. I wondered what blessings and challenges you all have faced as you have completed this challenge with your children.
Glad to see you on M* Jeff. Sounds like the girls are growing up fast.
My husband and I decided to share selected verses and summaries from our individual reading with our young children since we started re-reading the BOM this fall/winter. I wanted them to be able to “get through” it with us and didn’t think we would be able to accomplish that if we read verse by verse with them. Glad different approaches work for different families and individuals.
We read a chapter out of the Book of Mormon each night to our Emma Pleasant after she’d climbed into her crib. She doesn’t usually pay much attention but when we try to skip it she gets upset. ‘Book of Niemer, Book of Niemer!’ she says. Or else she’ll just say ‘need Niemer!’
I’m pretty sure this is all about putting off going to sleep and the comfort of bedtime routines, but she is getting a little out of it. A few days ago she went around all day saying ‘Alma. Alma. Alma.’
As a family, we just kept on doing what we’ve always been doing for the last dozen or so years, keep plodding through the Book of Mormon, ten or twelve verses at a time, before family prayer. We don’t usually stop to preach or teach, but comments happen all the time as the kids make links between their lives and the verses we read.
Individually, various family members made personal choices to read the whole on our own, at their own paces – my husband finished in early December, I finished with a day or two to go, the 15 year old with 4 hours left in the year, and the 17 year old at 11:15 pm New Year’s Eve. The teenagers decided on their own to do so (I think this is the power of example?), and were surprised yesterday morning to remember that the bishop had promised a steak dinner to all the teens who finished (“Bonus!” said one.) The 11 and 7 year old read some on their own, but we didn’t push them to finish, and we knew that by next summer, we’ll have gotten all the way through as a family and start over again. Just as we have before.
I bid my guilty pleasure of pride in my son. He took it on himself to read the book of mormon all on his own. And he did. He finished before his birthday, in mid October.
He turned 5
(no help from my wife or me (except to mark off the chapters he read), he did it himself – granted it was the book of mormon stories, but for his age we felt that it was sufficient. However, after he read it, he started to go through each one of the stories and look up the scripture references tied to each scripture story. I don’t know how this ended, but he was marking his scriptures in pencil last I knew)
I hope you will forgive me of my pride in my four year old in his reading ability and his want to follow the prophet. (I am sure this is normal in every four year old, but as a father, it was speciall to me.)
I told my then 7 year old about Pres. Hinkley’s request and suggested she pick a particular book in the BoM to read by Dec. 31st. I showed her the table of contents page and pointed out how many pages each book had.
She chose Mormon and finished it in a few weeks. She went onto Ether but I think she stopped somewhere along the way. She is very goal oriented, and so she responded well to the challenge.
(As you can see, I didn’t mention my then 5 year old son who is, ummm….not goal oriented? The kid takes an hour to put on his socks. However, if he gets passionate, he can learn amazing things…..today I got to look up the Battle of Midway so I could tell him all about it)
Kids are awesome. My brilliant son also takes an hour to put on his socks and shoes. He is usually in la la land right before church and he can’t find his shoes that are literally right next to him, talk about frustrating when you have 15 minutes to go and three kids (and a wife) to get out the door (trust me, the wife is sometimes harder than the kids:) ).