Getting family devotions started in our home was not easy. My husband and I didn’t grow up doing family devotions. We had no idea where to start, and we certainly didn’t know if what we were doing was “right.”
But after much thought and prayer, we implemented family devotions after breakfast over two years ago, and you know what? We’re still doing them!
Last year I shared How We Do Family Devotions with a Toddler (complete with videos – so don’t miss it!).
At the time of posting, my oldest was just over two years old and we’d been faithfully doing family devotions for more than six months.
Today I want to give an update on how we do family devotions now that we’ve been doing them for a couple of years (I seriously can’t believe it’s been more than two years already!).
Our Family Devotions Routine
We start right after breakfast, or while our oldest is still finishing (he’s a slow eater!), and we follow the same routine every single day.
Worship
We sing a song together as a family. We still allow our toddler to choose the song.
Songs we have sung:
- Jesus Loves Me
- Doxology
- Praise Him All You Little Children
- Jesus Loves the Little Children
- Amazing Grace
- The Fruit of the Spirit from Crazy Praise Album
- Hosanna {current favorite!}
It’s still not the prettiest sound you ever heard, but it’s beautiful to us and it always makes me smile.
Bible
Next we read the Bible together – just a short passage.
We use The Child Training Bible, and we usually read something from Proverbs or related to the Gospel.
We keep it short, and we still don’t talk about the passage unless our oldest seems particularly interested.
The point of this time is to create a habit of opening the Word of God together as a family.
Catechism
This is probably my favorite part of family devotions. We use the catechism from reformed.org.
My husband walks my son through the questions, and he answers them with guidance from me, if needed. He’s currently just over three years old and he has memorized through number 13.
Here’s a short clip of our three year old working through some of the Catechism just this week!
{If you cannot see the video, then click here.}
Memory Verse
Next we review our memory verses together.
Verses we have memorized:
- Genesis 1:1
- John 3:16
- Matthew 22:39
- Psalm 66:1
- Ephesians 6:1
This is an area we are slow going in. This isn’t because our oldest isn’t capable, it’s because we aren’t that great about faithfully reviewing and challenging him with memory verses.
Scripture memory is a weak link for my husband and me. I believe as we grow in scripture memory ourselves, it will translate over to our children.
Be sure to download your memory verse printables from our previous post about family devotions!
Prayer
We end our time in prayer together as a family.
As of right now we are working on memorizing The Lord’s Prayer together.
Our three year old can now recite it along with us almost word-for-word. We’ve been ending our time with this prayer for about six months.
Some additional notes:
We got out of routine for several months!
With my husband traveling 60% of the year, it was hard to keep any sort of routine.
But now that my husband quit his job, we’re home together every day as a family. Therefore, we make family devotions a priority.
I keep all of our daily materials in a Family Devotions Notebook.
Here let me show you:
{If you can’t see the video, then click here.}
And that’s how we do family devotions now that our toddler is older! It’s not fancy, and quite frankly it’s often messy. We drop spoons, we spill milk, and sometimes our three year old refuses to cooperate altogether.
But we persevere by grace knowing it’s not about how it looks, but about our hearts.
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I love that you’re doing family devotions with your young children. We have seen it become such a sweet time for our family as well. You might try using popsicle sticks to write the Scripture references on for the verses you’re memorizing. Put them in a container. Then choose one or two to review each night. When you learn a new one you add it to your collection. We’ve done much better with long term memory because of this. (You can do the same thing with your catechism questions.)
Have you ever tried this before for memorization? It’s brilliant and it is working beautifully for my husband and I and our five children, ages 1-9. We review four verses out of our scripture box {http://simplycharlottemason.com/timesavers/memorysys/} every morning at breakfast. It is a very systematic, INTENTIONAL way of not only teaching Scriptures but keeping them fresh in our minds. Kids and adults alike! We also include other memorization in the box (like books of the Bible, fruit of the Spirit, etc). We then do “Memory Lane” after dinner each night – each child recites a verse of his/her choice and Daddy awards a few Skittles or M&M’s. We do two or three rounds. It’s great because our kids see that DAD values the Word, not just Mom who is teaching it during the day. This Memory Lane idea is adapted from an idea from Michelle Duggar. Anyway, we’re now working on filling up our second box of Scriptures – my heart couldn’t feel more blessed, knowing the Word of God in their little hearts (and ours) will produce fruit. God bless you and thank you for all your great ideas and encouragement!
What a great idea! I’ve heard about this, but haven’t done it. I will though because going through everything every day is no longer feasible! Thanks so much for sharing!
Love this post! We do a very similar format with our 3 1/2 yr old, first a Bible story and a short story about the persecuted church (from barnabas fund prayer diary – we want him to learn compassion for fellow Christians in other countries). Then a prayer about what we’ve read, followed by the shorter catachesim for children and/or Bible memory verses and then singing (mix of kids songs or hymns from church) and we always finish by singing “He is Lord”. The whole thing usually takes 15-30 min depending how many songs we do :). We do ours after dinner as it works best for us (does mean I have to be more organised and have our dinner on the table earlier!) and have been doing family worship since he was 9/10 months, such a discipline some nights when he’s tired and grumpy (or we’re tired!) but so rewarding in the long run 🙂
Ooooo….there are GREAT ideas here that we’re gonna add to our Family Devos! Thank you so much!
This is awesome! thank you so much for sharing your ideas. Question though, where are the memory verse printables? When I click the link it just takes you back to the previous post but I don’t see anything for memory verse printables on that post. Thank you.
Well I don’t know where they went. Strange! I’m at the end of my work time right now, but I’ll search for them this afternoon.
I just googled “family devotion with toddler” and found your page! I’m really excited to start and love that you keep it simple because I tend to over complicate things. 🙂 I, too, was unable to find your memory verse printable.