Bring an Ancestor to Activity Days!

This week we are going to talk about family history.  I thought it would be fun to have the girls think about it in advance so I made this invitation.  The font is kind of hard to read, but basically they are going to "bring along an ancestor" by learning a story about, or dressing up as, or bringing an item that belonged to an ancestor of theirs.  I thought I would start with a 5 minute lesson on why we do family history work and why it is so important.  Then we will be taking turns introducing our ancestors to each other.  This will probably take most of the meeting, because we have 15 girls!  Then we will begin to fill out our pedigree charts.  I found this one at sugardoodle

I thought this one would be a good starter.  It's not the official church one, but we have some girls who don't know all their family info, have stepparents, etc.  So it is just a start for them.

To encourage them to finish this up, I am going to send them home with one of these:

A Family Histo-tree!

I found this at chasingmolly.com!  So cute!  The idea is you put treats in the bag, and then the leaves have some kind of family history assignment on each of them.  As they complete each assignment, they can get a treat out of the bag.  I am going to use Hearts instead of leaves, to emphasize the "turn the hearts of the children" aspect.  I will put the following assignments:

Finish your pedigree chart

Interview an ancestor (parent, grandparent)

Gather some family pictures of each side of your family

Write down a fun childhood story in your journal

Put everything in a box or folder so you can continue to work on your projects.

  

I actually made the pdf available here

I will try to post a picture of my tree when I finish it.  Still in progress!  :)   For our treat I thought it would be fun to have something to do with family history, but the only thing that came up when I googled was johnnycakes.  Seriously?  Did the people back then even want to eat them?  I am going to make a round sugar cookie and decorate it with a family tree (brown outline of branches with heart sprinkles).  I figure sugar cookie recipes get handed down right?  More pix to come!

Here is my family histo-tree!  The instructions are really simple:
Take a lunch bag and cut the top into 5 sections lengthwise, until you reach about the bottom 1/3.  Open the bag up and place candy inside.  Then take each of five sections and twist, like rope, to make the branches.  Tie around the base of branches with ribbon and then glue on leaves/hearts.

Here are the family tree sugar cookies I made.  I am not a cookie artist.  But I thought they turned out cute.