I love making little books, and that has rubbed off on my children. My six-year-old is into Harry Potter so our last book-making project was a spell book. As I have prepared for Easter and followed along with the Mormon.org campaign #PrinceofPeace, I have seen many lovely ideas for incorporating the principles of peace into our Easter celebrations. I was delighted to see a little booklet created by Emilie Ahern at AYearofFHE.net – Prince Of Peace Easter Activity Booklet for Kids!
Her lovely work inspired me to create a similar booklet that I’m sharing today. It’s also based on the 8 principles of peace – faith, compassion, forgiveness, repentance, gratitude, scripture, prayer, and hope. For each principle, there is a place to draw or paste a picture of someone in your family who exemplifies that principle and write a sentence about them.
It has been uplifting to talk with my children, parents, and grandmother about people in our family who are examples of finding peace through these principles. Their faithful lives bring me so much joy and I’m glad that I had this chance to ask and learn stories I hadn’t heard before. In family history, many of the stories that are passed down are funny, painful, memorable, about old technology or historical events. I love all of these stories, but I most of all want to share the stories of hope, compassion, prayer, and peace.
Asking for Stories
I brainstormed a list of people who I thought exemplified each principle, then called my mom. She helped me think of little stories and anecdotes that I could teach to my children. She also told of a difficult time in her life when everything seemed to be going wrong – health problems, car trouble, etc. – and she felt inspired to pray a prayer of gratitude. It brought her an overwhelming feeling of peace. Sharing this with my children was a sweet and tender experience.
Next I called my grandma. She told me about the time my grandfather was wronged in a business deal that was extremely difficult for him financially. I never knew about this though, because he didn’t speak about it or hold a grudge. Years later, the man came to ask forgiveness, which he freely gave.
Next I used the All the Stories web app to read stories on FamilySearch about my ancestors and relatives. It reminded me about my great grandmother Ettie and how she relied on prayer. She worried constantly when her two sons were away during WWII. Her daughter wrote that her family knew that she believed in God and prayer. She was not a member of the LDS church. I was so happy to learn that she was able to find peace through prayer.
Creating the Booklet
Download these two files:
My Family follows the Prince of Peace – COVER
My family follows the prince of peace booklet – INSIDE PAGES
I printed the cover on card-stock and the inside of the booklet on regular paper. Make sure to print the inside pages of the booklet double sided and flip on the short edge. Your printer dialog box will look like this:
Emilie’s booklet tutorial included this gem of a video about how to staple your booklet when you don’t have a large industrial stapler using a mouse-pad as the backing. This tip is going to change my life!
You can have your children draw their family members into the booklet, or with a little more preparation, you can have them cut out and glue in oval photos. I put photos of our immediate family, aunts and uncles, and grandparents into a word document and printed it. I spread the photos on the table so they could see lots of family members.
My kids chose the people they wanted to put in their booklet. We talked about what each principle of peace meant and then they chose someone who they thought represented that.
My 3 year old loves saying the prayer so she chose herself for that principle. She knows her brother loves his new scriptures that he carries to church so she chose him for scriptures. She liked hearing stories about her aunts and their faith in getting married and hope in trying to have a baby. After the first story about getting married, she kept asking for more stories about weddings. It was sweet.
Creating Oval Photos
The easiest way to create your oval photos of ancestors is to use the template I made in Canva. Click the link to view the template here: Oval photo template. You will need to set up a free Canva account. (You will love Canva! It’s great for design).
Also, here is a word document you can download and then insert your own photos into to make them into ovals of the correct size:
Photo tutorial for booklet – WORD docx
The document has instructions for what to do in it. You basically gather all your photos into one folder on your desktop and then insert them into the oval shape by right clicking on the oval.
I hope this is a meaningful activity for you and your family to focus on the Prince of Peace, discover and share stories of faith and peace with each other, and find joy for Easter.
Check out more #PrinceofPeace kits and ideas at The Read Headed Hostess.
Leave a Reply
Thanks for the note!