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LDS
Home Educators Assn. Newsletter
Periodic
messages of cheer and encouragement,
thought-provoking ideas, and timely
information
for homeschooling parents.
November
10, 2004
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The
Great Plan of Happiness Notebook - our most
exciting email ever!
Last summer my daughter and her family
visited from out of state. On the morning of
their departure, their ten-year-old son suddenly
announced that he had decided to stay with us
for two more weeks. Unprepared, but wanting to
be a good homeschool grandma, I thought this
seemed the right time to begin the Plan of
Happiness notebook I had been thinking about.
The next day I invited a granddaughter who
lives nearby and is about the same age to come
over, and the three of us talked a bit about the
pre-existence. Then we went to the local office
supply store to purchase our notebooks. When we
returned home, the children designed covers for
their notebooks while I began working on the
first page. Two weeks later, when my grandson
left, I was still working on that first page. I
had spent hours and hours. The children had lost
interest. I expressed my frustration to my
mentor, Jack Monnett, who told me to "look
through LuJean's stuff."
Ah,
yes! LuJean is the master at finding
foundational gospel material. She shares some of
her finds at our conference every year, but most
of it is presented in her monthly and annual
workshops. Sure enough, as I went through a huge
pile of handouts LuJean had shared with hundreds
of mothers I found a treasure that she had
uncovered -- and that I had not noticed. It was
a talk given to Church Education teachers in
1993 by President Boyd K. Packer. His words put
my little project into perspective and validated
that what I was doing was not only the right
thing but that it was a project of great
significance.
President
Packer's address was entitled "The Great
Plan of Happiness." He frequently speaks on
that subject; in fact I suspect that the whole
idea for my notebook had come from his
consistent emphasis on the Plan of Happiness.
My idea had been to make a notebook with
sections on the pre-Earth life, the Creation,
Earth Life, and post-Earth life. I pictured that
the Creation Day pages would be an introduction
to the various sciences and might lead to a
separate notebooks on astronomy, biology, etc. I
pictured the Earth Life section with timelines
that would lead to discussions of history,
especially family history, and to additional
history notebooks.
I
had also thought of a section called My Creation
of Me that would help the children understand
that they are in the process of building their
own character and their own future, and a
section on Gospel Principles for Everyday Living
where we might define a principle, then add
insights from scripture or a conference talk and
our own observations about the application of
that principle. I saw it as an ongoing project
that might become a written witness of their
homeschool experience.
All this seemed somewhat close to what
President Packer was suggesting. He said:
"Our youth need to know how to mark the
scriptures, and they need to have some kind of
filing system. In addition to that, if you give
each one of them a framework upon which the
truths they discover at random can be organized
into a personal testimony, you will have served
them well."
Yes! A notebook is a filing system. And if a
person makes his own, it is his testimony.
He said, "After I had taught seminary
for a number of years, I discovered something
that made a difference in how much students
learned and how much they remembered.
"What I discovered was this: there is
great value in presenting a brief but very
carefully organized overview of the entire
course at the very beginning." He suggested
that the first class or two be used for that
purpose and said the preview will "make it
possible for the students to locate themselves
anywhere along the way." "The preview
forms a framework and is more than worth the
time and work invested in it."
That was exactly what I was trying to do. I
was attempting, in an outline of a dozen pages,
to preview The Plan and their place in it. I
hoped my grandchildren would add insights and
information over the years.
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