I Lived In Heaven

First off, I chose to teach I Lived In Heaven this month instead of "The Family is of God" thinking that most of the kids already know this song and why make my job any harder than it has to be? Plus I think the story of this song is really something they all need to know. Boy, I don't know if that was the best idea now!! This song has been the hardest one EVER to teach to Junior Primary. I think there are just so many words that it's really hard for them. Plus it doesn't help that our Sacrament Meeting has been running over into Primary time every week and that I get like 5 minutes to teach them a whole verse! Yuck. We finally made it to the second verse last week, but they still don't know the first one very well. We may not even make it to the third verse next week. Hopefully singing this song over and over throughout the rest of the year will be enough for Junior Primary to pick it up. Senior Primary is a whole different story though. Sacrament Meeting doesn't eat into the time I have with them and they're all able to read so that ALWAYS helps. Plus they already knew the first verse really well so we've made it through all the verses already and hopefully on Sunday we can just review them. Here are my posters for I Lived In Heaven. I just cut off the hole-edge of some page protectors and taped them onto posterboard. I found some GAK pictures (except for the Plan of Salvation picture that I made - see previous post) that would go along with the words and made some separate words strips to stick on and take off when they've learned the songs a little better. There are 2 posters and 1 is front/back.

I started out teaching them this song by telling them it was a story song - a "Ballad." I had 4 word strips that said "Who, What, When,& Where" on them (one for each word.) Then I asked them to answer the questions. They all looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, "What? Why can't you answer the questions?" They all just looked at me in Junior Primary (like always!) but thankfully Senior Primary said, "Because we don't know the story yet!" I also had up on the board the word strips that go with the song (the ones on the pictures above.) So we went through and talked about the story of the song and then I sang the first verse for them and asked them to listen for where to put the word strips on the poster. This gets them to actually listen to the words you're saying. We went through each picture and put the words on the poster. Senior Primary got them without any help. With Junior Primary I had to repeat the whole line of the song and have them find the words to put up. Then we sang through the whole first verse. I asked them if they thought they knew the story yet and they did so I picked a child to come up and pick one of the question cards. Each of the question cards had a more detailed question like, " What did Heavenly Father present?" For Junior Primary to answer the question they could either give me the exact line of the song or point to the picture and give me their best effort at the exact line of the song. Senior Primary had to give me the exact line but they could get help from their friends if they needed it. It worked really well! Over the next two weeks we did the same thing with Senior Primary and know they know it all! Junior Primary needed some more work on the first verse so we did that one for two weeks and moved on to the second verse just last week.

This coming week I'm planning on reviewing all three verses with Senior Primary and hopefully reviewing 1&2 with Junior and at least introducing 3 to them. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do this yet. I think we may play hide the note and we can sing the song over and over and over. : )