Visitors

Since we have a set date every week for our Family Night, we have to be flexible to make it happen consistently. If we have people over during our normal time, we gladly invite them to participate. Even college-age friends have enjoyed our time as well as families with children. When we are travelling for holidays or vacations, I still plan some type of family activity. Once I talked about people who travelled in the Bible, like Moses. Half of the time we are travelling over a holiday, so we extend our time with the grandparents or aunts or uncles and celebrate the time together.

What do your kids like?

During our family nights, we use a lot of music. My children are also very interested in animals and the Five Minute Devotional book that I bought at Target is excellent. It describes a characteristic of a certain animal and how that relates to God.
Take what your child is interested and go from there. Keep in simple and make it your own, that's how to make family devotionals work and not be some stressful complicated plan. Make it fun and it will be fun ;)

All of the Past Family Nights entered in

I have gotten all of my activities logged. Now I just need to keep them up-to-date each week. In the spreadsheet there are almost two years of weekly family nights documented. I just give a brief description of each week mainly because the activities were brief and to the point for preschooler attention spans. If you would like me to expand on any topics, please leave me a comment.

Special Days to Celebrate

I'm just about to enter in the time my family celebrated Memorial Day. I used that day to teach my children about our military and also God's military stories in the Bible. The day before at church, the children learned about David and Goliath. They were at war and there were soldiers fighting on two sides. (I have girls and the concept of war was difficult to describe). We watched a parade of soldiers that day and then we march around the living singing, "I'm in the Lord's Army".
Take these special opportunities to teach your children about life and how it relates to God.

God Rocks!

If you're looking to do memory verses with your children, I encourage you to buy a God Rocks! CD. It's awesome music where the lyrics are purely scripture. I have BibleToons: Be Strong and Grow in the Lord and they just released another one that I'll order soon. Check it out: https://www.godrocksvideo.com
I have done devotionals based on these songs and they're not too childish for adults to enjoy. They sounds like "oldies" music, singers sound like the Beatles or Elvis.

Resources I used

Here's a spattering of materials I used. I've gotten them from friends, recommendations from Family Time or from the local Christian store and of course the library is grand:

1. Proverbs: Family Night Tool Chest from Heritage Builders
2. The Children's Topical Bible by Mary Hollingsworth
3. Everyday Graces: A Child's Book of Good Manners by Karen Santorum
4. Five Minute Devotions for Children by Pamela Kennedy
5. An Advent of Ideas by Christmas Sharing
6. Cedarmont Kids Action Bible Songs CD
7. Memory Verse Movitators by Cheryl Price
8. Resurrection Eggs
9. First Bible Stories boardbook Bible by Stuart Branch /Parragon Publishing
10. Me Too! Books by Marilyn Lashbrook

How I got started

First I started with the Family time organization and their outline for Family Nights.
http://www.famtime.com
We picked a very simple theme song, "B-I-B-L-E" song from a children's CD we own. So we picked a day that would work for our schedule and one that would work consecutively every week. Since we started when the twins were almost two years old, time expectation was around 10 minutes total.
We played the song and then quickly explain what we're going to talk about. I planned a short activity with a main topic and then end with prayer. If the activity required more time, we'd pray mid-way during the activity and then finish it up later.
I wrote a brief explanation of what we did every week. I'm glad that I did that because now I'm logging it all here for others to use.

Spreadsheet of Ideas

Here's all of my devotions logged so far:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ppiDZ7YunhtY-_r9WzfYJUg

where to start for family devotions

For the past two years my family has held a weekly devotional night. Since our children are quite young the content was very simple and short. We used resources that we had in the house or ones we ran across. I encourage you to read my ideas and make them personal for you own family.
Here's the organization that inspired me: www.famtime.com