Today was the first day of my kids Summer Vacation! This Summer I thought it'd be fun to focus on some neat people in the scriptures. We are started with people in the Book of Mormon. I don't know about other kids, but I know my love super heros and since there are some pretty awesome people in the scriptures I thought it'd be fun to take a scripture hero spin on things. I have pointed out to my kids that though these were awesome people, they were not perfect by any means. I also gave each person a "super power", but plan to point out each time that these people have other admirable qualities as well. I'm just hoping that giving the people a super power it will help my kids remember something about each person. I made charts for each hero. Here is Nephi's Scripture Hero Chart. I hope that if you click on the link you will be able to download this file for personal use. If you blog about it please link it back to this blog. The clip art for this chart came from Free LDS Clip Art. We will be focusing on Nephi all week. I made plans and then switched after I had already planned a week of Nephi activities so he'll be the only one we focus on for that length of time. Looking back, I probably should have made today's about Lehi, but I didn't. Anyway, we focused on Nephi and his family leaving Jerusalem today. We watched a couple of videos to help tell the story about Lehi warning the people and Lehi leaving Jerusalem. These videos are put out by the Church and I will be using them daily. I also used these flannelboard figures to help us remember Nephi and his brothers while we reviewed why they were leaving Jerusaluem. I wrote down a list of things that they would take or leave behind as they traveled in the wilderness. I had them pull the items out of a hat and decide whether they thought they'd take them or not. I also taught them a little song that I learned as a kid from Scripture Scouts about leaving Jerusalem. We then "packed" up and took a walk around our neighborhood pretending to travel to the wilderness. As we walked we talked about all the things they had to leave behind and how Laman and Lemuel complained a lot because the journey was hard. However, Nephi prayed to Heavenly Father and knew that his father had been commanded to leave and how Nephi had the courage to follow him. After our walk we came home and built a tent pretending to be in the wilderness. They loved this part. After being in the tent for a while I gave them these coloring pages to color while they were still in their tent. Teaching LDS Children is a valuable source when looking for ideas and printables for these lessons. Check out Lesson 2 for more about Lehi leaving Jerusalem. Blue Skies Ahead also has a great F.H.E idea for this topic as well. We had a lot of fun so I hope it continues as the summer goes on. Tomorrow we will talk about Nephi and the Brass Plates.