Hands-On LDS Devotional: Painting Lehi’s Dream

I love to start our school day with a simple devotional but I’m struggling with how to make it memorable for my young son when he has a sister dancing around distracting him. My son is seven now, so I know he can do more than simply listen to the words of scriptures. I know he understands.

The past few weeks we were revisiting General Conference talks but now we are back to our (very slow) study of The Book of Mormon.

This week I decided to ask Raisin respond to what we read (1 Nephi 8) by painting it.

Neither of us are crafty. My son rarely asks for craft projects and does not spend a ton of time on coloring. He never has. If I’d have asked him to draw a picture or describe the vision, he would have given me a hard time. Nevertheless, when I brought out the watercolor paints and told him to paint Lehi’s dream, he was eager to get started!

We read chapter 8 one day, and the next day he painted. He referenced the scriptures as he painted, making sure to include the iron rod, tree, building, river, and mist. I made a painting myself! You can see our two paintings in the image above. It was quite fun to do as well. (Strawberry just made a mess on about 8 page of her Elmo coloring book.)

In all, I think it was a successful devotional because he was engaged in the scripture story throughout the time, and even Strawberry did not distract him from the concepts we talked about.

How do you keep your kids engaged in morning devotionals?