When I repent, I can be forgiven

Repentance. Such a great thing to teach children. It's such a beautiful apect of the gospel.

 

I like the idea of starting with the words cut out individually and piecing them together in to make the sentence "When I repent, I can be forgiven." (This is in the outline provided by the church.) If you didn't want to place them in envelopes you could stick them under random chairs and have them check. This is an immediate attention-getter, and I like it for that reason.

 

I like the story of the Prodigal Son. I think this is a good way to go, but I also really like the story of Alma the Younger. This came to my mind almost immediately when I was thinking this week over. I found an old friend article that tells the story for anyone who doesn't like summarizing themselves, you can find that HERE. I found a page on Sugardoodle (seriously, I love that site!) that is dedicated to this story. It has way too much to list but in short, it has links to clipart, lesson helps and a lot more that involve this story.  You can find all of that good stuff HERE.
 

This is the part I was really excited about. For this week I want to do a object lesson. Show everyone a penny that is clean and new looking. Tell them that this is them when they are born. Throughout their lives they make mistakes, they sin. If we don't repent we can't stay clean. Show them an old penny that is dirty. Pour some lemon juice into a clear glass and put the penny in. According to THIS site (I wanted to try this out before posting but haven't had the chance. It may be a good idea to that beforehand, haha), it will just wipe clean (You may have to soak it). Tell them that sin is like the dirt on the coin, and the repentance process is like the lemon juice. If we repent after we sin, we can be clean and pure like when we're babies (or after baptism). I thought the example of babies would be more universal because there are lots of kids in my primary who aren't 8 yet and therefore haven't been baptized.

Give each child a clean penny to take home to remind them of how they can repent and stay clean.

**Variations** Because I haven't tried this experiment yet, I am not sure how long it takes to soak the penny in the lemon juice to get it clean. If you do this at home first and it takes longer then 30 seconds or so, you may want to drop some dirty pennies in there before you do sharing time so they have time to soak and get clean. You can always drop a dirty one in and just pull a clean one out. I am going to have to test this to see if it works.