December 1

Today is the first day in our 25 Days of Christmas! To get us started, here is a wonderful quote from none other than Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol:

...I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

May we make our own Christmas celebrations this year kind, forgiving, and charitable. Merry Christmas!!

For Your Information...
Charles Dickens was a Victorian-era author of many, many books. Some of his best known works include Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield. And of course, you can't forget about A Christmas Carol! To learn more about Dickens, his life, and his works, click here.

Stay Tuned!!

Tomorrow kicks off our 25 Days of Christmas! Be sure to check the blog daily to enjoy a brief moment of reflection on the wonders of Christmas. We will be featuring quotes from great literature and influential authors about this lovely season! And we'll learn a little about the authors themselves along the way. Don't miss it!

Five Days, Five Different Ways

Last week's post focused on ways of using the tools in the Ensign General Conference issue. Now that the November issue has arrived, I thought I'd take one more week to give you one more idea! Call it Five Days, Five Different Ways. Before I had kids, I taught language and literacy to people of all ages. In the field of language learning, we talk about the four skill areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The ideas below build off the idea that each of these skill areas is essential and will help you learn in different ways. Choose a talk you'd like to study, and then here's what you can do:

DAY 1: READ the talk for general themes and principles. Underline the ideas that stand out to you the most. Choose one quote (or more!) and write it on an index card. Place it where you will see it often during the week!

DAY 2: READING EXTENSION. Read the scriptures listed in the footnotes of the talk. Look for connections between the various references. If you have time, go further with each passage by reading the cross-references specific to those verses in the scriptures. You might be surprised where they take you! (Try doing this online where you can more easily follow a trail of hyperlinks.)

DAY 3: LISTEN to the talk on lds.org. Hearing the voices/inflections of the various speakers helps you glean more about what they are really trying to convey. Also, listening engages a different part of your brain. If you are an auditory learner, this may really help! After you listen, skim the talk and underline the comments that stood out to you differently.

DAY 4: TALK. Find a study partner or willing family member/friend. If you have family/friends with whom you can share your insights, talk to them and share your ideas! Bring up the questions you wrote down on Day One. Learn from each other! This is where our focus area of "Reading Together" really come into play!

For another spin/approach, think how you would teach from the talk. Outline some ideas for a Family Home Evening or other teaching context. What would you emphasize? Why? Is there some kind of object lesson you're familiar with that conveys the main idea? Or do you have a personal experience that underscores the theme? Save your notes for the next week's FHE or otherwise!

DAY 5: WRITE about it. Read the talk one more time. Write for a few minutes in your journal about what you have learned, how it has changed your understanding, and/or what you take away from it to influence your own life.

Even if you don't want to do five days in a row, some of these ideas may give you a new way to study and learn from the General Conference talks. Whatever you do, don't miss out on the wondeful wisdom and direction they offer!

One last thought: you may have noticed that some of the features listed in last week's post are not outlined in the same way in this issue. Check out the General Conference website and the For Youth Today link for similar resources online!

The Conference Issue

It's just me this week, so I hope I can be as engaging as all the others who have contributed of late!

If you recall my posts back in May and June, you can probably guess what I'm going to say this week.... the Ensign is coming!! The May and November issues usually arrive a little later than the other months, but I look forward to to them like no other. It's a little like Christmas! Why? Because the May and November issues contain the talks shared with us in General Conference. I often liken General Conference to drinking straight from the well of Living Water. I can't get enough! And though I enjoy listening to or studying the talks again digitally, there's something magical about holding real paper with printed words. These are truly the living scriptures! I know that the principles we are taught in these discourses are true, that they give us light and security and guidance in a world where there are so many voices pulling us in different directions.

So how can we let that vitality of living scripture from inspired leaders influence our daily lives? Since our focus area on the blog the past two months has been about sharing the literacy experience, here are some ideas for sharing these talks in a way that they may come alive for YOU and those you share them with, family or otherwise.

First, the Conference issues have a wealth of tools already in them! You can refer to May's issue right now until the November one comes. Note the topic index listed at the front of the issue, right after the Table of Contents pages. If you want to learn or ponder more about a certain topic, this is a great place to start. But don't stop there!

Next, check out the back of the issue. There's a two-page spread titled "Making Conference a Part of Our Lives" (p. 128-129). Right there, a lot of the work has already been done for you! The editors do a survey of the talks and pull together common threads/themes that apply to broader groups. They break it out for children and youth especially, but grown-ups, too! I love the list of scripture stories and where they were referenced in talks. It can really bring the scripture story to life in a  new way for you, and the talk will have better meaning too!

If you keep flipping after that spread, there are pages focused on additional youth topics. The New Era and Friend usually have articles this month, too. 

Finally, before the News section, there's the Conference Story Index. What a great reference! This is the perfect place to find a story to share in family home evening or to just to enjoy for yourself!

Beyond these tools, try out some of the ideas below to keep the Conference talks alive in your hearts. I know you won't regret it!

GENERAL

• Take notes as you read. Keep them in a journal. Or if there's a specific talk that really resonates with you right now, print it out and keep it handy. Keep a binder of your favorite talks over the years. When you're struggling with something, you can always go back to these talks and find wonderful comfort!
• When you read one of the talks, take time to discuss it with someone. Be it around the family dinner table or on your daily walk with a friend, discussing it will not only make it more personal for you, it will strengthen others as well.
• Read a talk and then take another day to study all the scriptural cross-references listed at the end. You can learn so much about the scriptures by doing this!
• Have a study partner! Decide on a talk you will both read then keep each other accountable and discuss it later. It will strengthen your relationship AND your understanding. Not a bad investment!
• Depending on your personality/reading style, you might like to sit down and read it all, but my guess is that most of us don't have the time or energy to do that. (Or, it's ok to admit it! ..maybe you just feel overwhelmed by so much content and never get around to it?) Make a plan or set aside some time for yourself to read. Maybe Sunday afternoons? Or Tuesdays at lunch? Whatever works for you. Spreading it out over the next few months will keep that living water pumping happily through you!
• Always try to read the talk selected for the fourth Sunday of the month in Relief Society. The "Teachings for Our Time" lessons are always some of my favorite!

FOR CHILDREN

• While you read for yourself, look for object lessons that you can turn into a family home evening lesson. One that comes to mind for our family was a talk from a long while ago by President Hinckley about the Four Cornerstones of Our Faith. If your kids love (or ever loved) blocks, they'd love building and learning about these ideas!
• Tell one of the stories from the Story Index and have your children draw a picture about it.
• Have your children flip through the issue and pick out one of the photographs. Talk to them about how those people look/feel in the picture. Why do they think that? Use their ideas as a bridge to bearing testimony -- about Conference, our prophet, leaders, music, whatever! OR, talk about where the people live and what's interesting or beautiful about that culture, how we are all God's children.
• Play a matching game with the pictures of the General Authorities! Or have them count how many times President Monson spoke. Think of the issue not just as a reference for articles but as a fun tool for games and familiarizing them with the Church. If they learn to love it now, they will be more inclined to want to read it later.

FOR YOUTH
Obviously, I do not have teenagers yet, but I have taught them plenty! (And I like to think I still remember what it was like to be one?)

• Let them be the teacher. Either choose a talk and have them teach the family about it, or let them find one themselves and report on it. This can be in family home evening or just at breakfast or dinner. Trust their judgment! And don't be surprised if they push back at first. :)
• Cross-reference with seminary. Look at the scriptures listed at the back of the issue that are scripture mastery verses (see the yellow callout box on p. 129 of the May issue, for example). Focus on those that correspond with this year's scriptures.
• If you have sons who will be joining Dad on home teaching, maybe they can be involved with the preparation of the message.
• Again, don't miss the Youth pages at the back!
• Consider making the talks part of your family scripture study. You don't have to necessarily put aside whatever it is you're already reading together, but maybe take one or two days a week to read a talk instead.
• Design some kind of family challenge for the older ones in your house to read this issue!

Last but not least, just keep this issue out and available until the next Conference issue comes. Try to make it a habit to look and see what the most recent addresses have said about something you are pondering. For your families, you can set the example of following the prophet -- not just out of duty, but out of the love of his words. He is the mouthpiece for our Savior Jesus Christ. Let your children (and friends!) catch you reading! And when they are working through something themselves, don't forget to pull out this issue!

Happy reading!

Family Reading

This week's post is brought to us by our very own Jennifer T. She may have moved away a few months ago, but she still is one of us! Not only is her background in literature, she also invests a great deal of time and energy enriching her children's education through reading. Check out the resources and recommendations she lists below. Thanks, Jennifer!

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One of my favorite activities is family reading in the evenings. This is when we try to block out all non-essential activities (as much as possible), so that we can have good quality and quantity time together to sit and read a good book aloud. The books are wonderful, but that’s not why I love family reading time. This is a time, set aside, where we SLOW DOWN. We have great discussions, and we bond as a family. A good book will have many springboards for great discussions. This is often where our inspiration for delving into new subjects of study comes from—it is where our imaginations are sparked—where we are inspired to try things that might initially seem scary or too difficult (like pursing our dreams or changing a habit we don’t like in ourselves). Are we focusing on all of the artistic elements in the books—the ones our English teachers loved to point out and make us write pages upon pages of reports? Not really. We just focus on what stands out to us as we listen.

What do we read? We try to focus on classic books. These books are timeless. To us, a classic book is one that is worth reading over and over again because you can get more understanding out of it each time you read, according to what experiences you have had since the first reading. Obviously, scriptures are our first classic, but there are so many others. I’ve found a great list of books for children from nursery age up to 8th grade that we are focusing on reading just now. It was compiled by John Senior (1923-99), who was a classicist professor at the University of Kansas. You can find the list here. I do not necessarily read one book right after the other; I use this list as a guide for acquiring my personal home library. We think it is fun to just pull a book off the shelf that looks interesting to us. If it isn’t right for us to read at the time, we have no problem setting it aside and choosing another one.

Another place that I go to for recommended readings (for adults and older youth) is a site for George Wythe University. They list the books they use for freshmen on up to PHD courses. They have a classics-based curriculum. Their website is http://www.gw.edu/. I like looking for books that an English educator in the Victorian times (her name was Charlotte Mason) coined “living” books. These books are written by those who love their fields of study—books where enthusiasm shines through. A good guide to choosing your own list of classics could be summed up in the 13th article of faith, “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”

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With these great lists and recommendations, all we need to do now is make reading a part of our family time. Try taking the time to explore one of these books with your family -- and enjoy!