How can you engage your children or grandchildren in family stories? Give them paper and crayons and let them illustrate the story as you tell it. I’ve been writing fictionalized accounts of my dad’s tales so that his posterity could know him. Having my grandchildren in town gave me the chance to tell them the latest story in his saga and see their creativity. We marveled at his surviving so many adventures. So far I’ve written...
For Father’s Day, my kids and I came up with a project to learn about fathers in our family tree and how they are courageous, strong, generous, and kind…like super heroes! We also made a “Super Dad” card that you can draw a picture of dad’s face on (or glue a photo onto it). Here are the printables ! Super Dads In My Family Tree To learn about the wonderful qualities that dads in our...
LDS General Conference is coming up! Here are two free, printable activities you can do with your kids using photos of the general authorities as children. As you know, I love making coloring pages of our family and ancestors from photos, so I thought this would be a fun way to do the same for a conference activity to help my kids learn that the apostles were kids once, too. Have you read Kid Presidents?...
I asked my 3-year-old daughter if she knows what it means to be brave. She didn’t. I told her that it means “doing something you are afraid of, or doing something that is hard.” Then I read Seven Brave Women with her. We discussed several different ways that everyday women in the past were brave. Seven Brave Women by Betsy Hearne is a story about the brave deeds of the author’s ancestresses. Each of them did something...
ReallyColor is a website that allows you to create coloring books from photos. The website isn’t free, but it’s very simple! Anyone can use it. After you create a coloring page with their website, you can decide if you like it enough to purchase it. You can buy photo credits for about $0.40 each if you buy 10 or more at a time (if you just buy one, it’s about $1.50). I’ve made coloring pages...
BeFunky.com is a photo editing website you can use to create coloring pages out of old family photos. The web tool is free for general photo editing but the “sketcher” filters which you apply to make coloring pages, are available in the plus version only. BeFunky Plus costs $4.95 per month or less if you pay annually. The BeFunky Mobile app, however, is free! BeFunky Website Go to BeFunky.com and click on the photo editor....
St. Patrick’s Day is only a few days away! Here are some ways that we’ve been celebrating our Irish Heritage: Learn about your Irish Heritage Did you know that 3.7 million American residents claim Irish ancestry? According to this graphic, that’s more than 7X the population of Ireland. Between 1830 and 1940, nearly 4.5 million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States. Do you have any Irish immigrants in your family tree? If so, here’s an article about...
Need a way to share family stories with your kids more often? How about coloring pages? Every so often, we create a coloring page about one of our grandparents. While my son was coloring one of his Great Grandpa Elder today, he remembered that Great Grandpa passed away last year. He talked about missing him and wondered what he looked like when he was younger. As he thought about it, he colored this picture of Grandpa in the army. We...