The Jesus Storybook Bible Archives

Fruit of the Spirit (Family Devotion Unit for Preschoolers & Toddlers)

Back in the fall of last year I began sharing our family devotions on the blog. I had all the lessons typed up and ready to post and forgot to publish them. Along the way I discovered that there were some things that needed to be tweaked to work better for our family, especially now that we have a newborn!

I am happy and excited to share our full 9 lesson unit of the Fruit of the Spirit for Preschoolers and Toddlers!

|| CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD OUR FREE LESSON PLAN PDF FOR THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT UNIT ||

Below are the Supplies + Resources for our Fruit of the Spirit Family Devotional Unit. Affiliate links are included for your convenience.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. This family devotion unit will always remain free, but I love getting feedback! Let me know what did or didn’t work for you.

The first step for any family wanting to start a having weekly family devotions it to set aside a regular time each week to do it. After dinner works great for us but we have also had success in the morning after breakfast. Don’t look for perfection when having family devotions. There is no perfect family and there is no set way to do this. Figure out what length and format works best for you and have fun!

Once you have your day of the week and time set for your family devotions don’t schedule anything else during that time. Remember it is only 20-30 minutes each week. Making this time a priority for your family shows your children how important it is to spend time together in God’s Word.

One of my biggest joys as a mom is seeing my kids delight in God’s Word. I hope this resource blesses and encourages you and your family to take joy in God’s Truth together!

xo, Tamara

PS…Be sure to check out the new Resources page under Family Devotions in the Main Menu. I have added a current list of books and media that we own and would recommend. Any of these resources would be excellent ways to create family engagement and discussions around God’s Word and to incorporate into a family devotion.

PPS…I am also in the process of updating my blog and removing links that are no longer active. If you have been a reader for awhile (I started doing this in 2013) I removed a ton of posts that had pictures of the kids because of content/photos being stolen and used on other websites. All that to say, thanks for continuing to read and I hope to have a more functional and easy to navigate website for you in the next few weeks :).

How We Do Family Devotions with a Toddler & Preschooler

Josh and I were both raised going to church but neither of our families had a specific time each week that was spent at home worshiping together as a family. We both really liked the idea of having weekly family devotions but didn’t really have any clue where to start.

So I went and looked where most 32 year olds go when they have a question, yep, I googled it. I googled books, websites, and blogs and I soon discovered that there wasn’t very much available for families with a toddler and preschooler. Or at least there wasn’t much that I thought our kids would have the attention span for.

Since Josh and I had never experienced doing family devotions with our own families growing up we figured that as long as we were filling our home with Jesus and God’s Word and including our children we didn’t really need a book to tell us how to do it. But…we still needed to have a plan.

First I decided that the Fruit of the Spirit would be a great starting place for our family.

Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law!”

With 9 separate topics to cover I was well on my way to outlining our family devotions for the next several months. I have found that repeating the same verse, story, or prayer to our kids is the best way for them to memorize and learn. For this reason we are going to spend 3 weeks on each Fruit of the Spirit. I made 9 separate lessons and our family will be doing each lesson once a week, for three weeks, before moving on to the next.

I am also extending the time between each lesson because in November we are adding a new baby to our family. I am choosing to extend extra grace to myself during this time.

Each of our Fruit of the Spirit lessons will feature a time of worship, a bible story, memory verse, prayer, and also an additional activity that can be incorporated into the family devotional time or done separately. Last week we sat down as a family after dinner and had our first family worship time together in our home. It took us a total of 20 minutes start to finish.

I created this for our family to use with our preschooler (4 year old) and toddler (2 year old) but started thinking there might be other families who would be interested in doing this with us. This is why I am going to be sharing all the lesson plans here on the blog.

More details are below and even more details can be found in the main menu under Family Devotions.

SUPPLIES

Below are the Supplies + Resources for our Fruits of the Spirit Family Devotional Unit.

If you plan on doing this with us I would be thrilled to see any photos you would like to share.

Follow on Instagram – I would love to see any pictures you take of your family doing this so please feel free to tag me @theworkoutmama.

Does your family do devotions together? I would love to hear what you do!