With Thanksgiving around the corner, it’s fun to think of something special to give our kids to celebrate the occasion. I enjoy giving my kids Thanksgiving books and books about thankfulness. Reading books together on thankfulness is a great way to encourage our kids to be thankful and get them excited about celebrating Thanksgiving!
I hope you enjoy this devotional designed for ages 4-8 to teach your children how to have a thankful heart. Read the italic section or paraphrase with your children to fit their age level. -Taylor
The month of Thanksgiving is the perfect time to cultivate a heart of thankfulness in our children. With the remembrance of the pilgrims and how God helped them through their trials, we can appreciate how much God has blessed us and thank Him for all He has done in our lives too!
Living in today’s modern world, we have a great number of parenting websites, blogs, and resources available at the tip of our fingers. While this can be a good thing for so many reasons, it can also feel like searching for precious gems amidst the rocks and debris surrounding them, and then determining if the gems truly hold value.
Arielle Lewis is an amazing mom and woman of faith who has a passion to help people with disabilities find acceptance and thrive in their lives and communities. She has been a special education teacher, special needs director, consultant, and more recently, God has given her a beautiful second daughter named Charlotte, who happens to have Down syndrome. She and her husband started a blog, The Lewis Pride, to help people see ability differences through “mighty eyes,” and they started a non-profit, The Mighty Waffle, a career development center that offers jobs and internships for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as providing education to the community about disabilities .
What do you want your children to look like when they are grown? Do you desire for them to be focused on success, materialism, and entertainment? Or do you want them to be living in communion with God and raising your grandchildren to live for the Lord as well?
Recently the Lord connected me with Charmé Fletcher, founder of the blog, Covenant Heirs, and coauthor with her husband of Making a Spiritual Discipleship Plan. My husband and I enjoyed using her spiritual discipleship plan resource to come up with our own discipleship plan for our family. It is an amazing tool and really helped us develop a vision for our family, so we stay centered on what matters most in life. I asked her to guest blog for us to tell you more about this wonderful tool…
If we are teaching our children to be followers of Jesus, we must teach and encourage them to help others! Children naturally love to help, yet we often get so involved in what we need to accomplish as parents that we forget to include our children when we are serving. We can give them age-appropriate opportunities, and we can model what it looks like to help others, so they can learn to show God’s love by meeting people’s physical, monetary, emotional, and spiritual needs.
Recently we had the opportunity to take a family vacation with some friends on a cruise to the Bahamas! We had such a wonderful time with our family and friends and enjoyed God’s beautiful creation all around us. There was only one thing missing… we wished we had a family vacation devotional to do with our kids over the trip to encourage us to keep our hearts more focused on the Lord and His ways!
I hope you enjoy this devotional designed for ages 4-8 to teach your children how to have a helping heart. Read the italic section or paraphrase with your children to fit their age level. -Taylor
Introduction: Of all the people in the world, who do you think has the most beautiful heart? Jesus has the most perfect heart! He shows how beautiful His heart is by His character- the way He acts towards God and others. Can you think of some character traits that Jesus shows? [kind, responsible, prayerful] We want to be like Jesus and have a beautiful heart too!
