Keeping Young Children Engaged

When given free rein of the local library a toddler or young child is not likely to gravitate towards the chapter book section. They are much more likely to spend their time with a pile of picture books sporadically spread around them as they flip through the pages and admire the bright and engaging pictures. This is what led me to this gospel art method of scripture study with my children.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a media library over flowing with exquisite art depicting a majority of the events contained in the scriptures. They are free, easy to access and have great potential to capture a child’s attention as they assist in describing special moments contained in the scriptures. These pictures can be displayed on your phone, another electronic device, or printed off and placed in a book or binder for your child to flip through whenever he wants.

When using these pictures for family or a child’s personal scripture study we pick out one picture that we will talk about. To make things even easier, the scriptures that the picture is portraying are listed on the church website next to the picture. We read through these scriptures and talk about things that happened in those scriptures as well as different things that we can see in the pictures. Frequently during family home evening we will ask our children about a certain event in the scriptures and they will start to describe it using details they remember from one of the media library pictures.