Train up your Child

"Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it."  Proverbs 22:6. 

I love that I can work from home to bring in a little extra income for our family but GouldThreads is just a part time job.  My real full time job is to raise my children, to "train (them) in the way (they) should go." 

As a mother of two young children this verse gives me so much hope and comfort.  The scariest thing that I can think of in raising my children is that there is nothing I can do to give them salvation.  That is a choice they will need to make for themselves.  But what a relief to know that their hearts are in God's hands.  As their mother it is my job to train them- to the best of my ability and to trust God with the rest.   That really helps to take some of the pressure off!  So how do you train a 2 year old to love and obey God?  In many ways it is easy because they thirst to learn new things are eager to accept.  My daughter is 2 1/2 and loves to read and loves crafts.  So after using the curriculum from the truth in tinsel's e-book for our Christmas advent I decided to continue with weekly Bible readings and crafts to further teach my daughter about God and his love.  She has many different children's Bible's but after looking through each of them I decided to use This Bible called God's story for me storybook Bible.

The first couple of weeks focused on creation.  I cut out large numbers 1-6 for her to decorate to correspond to the things God created on that day.  To teach her about God's rest on day number seven I thought it would be fun to make a pillow together.
I let her pick from a small selection of material that I had laying around and used Heat n' Bond to "sew" the sides.  Then she helped to fill her pillow with stuffing.  She really loved this part. 

stuffing her new pillow

She was so proud of her new pillow.  She even removed her big pillow from her bed (and hid it in her brother's closet) and asked to use the new pillow for her nap that day! 

We are planning to do Resurrection Eggs to count down to Easter this year and hope to continue making our way through her Bible with crafts the rest of the year. 

If you have any ideas that have worked for you to share God's love with toddler's I would love to hear from you!