D&C 30-36 - Lesson Report

This week's Primary lesson from the Come Follow Me (CFM) manual was from the section on Doctrine & Covenants 30-36, entitled "You are called to preach my gospel". As with the CFM lesson plan, I opted to focus on D&C 33, in which Joseph Smith revealed one of a series of revelations in New York in 1830. 

I begin each lesson with a quick reminder of who Joseph Smith is and what the D&C represents, and today I provided some background on how small the church was back in 1830 (as Joseph had only recently started the church the year before), and showed these two images:

• Joseph preaching to his small congregation (link to LDS site).
• A log cabin similar to the one he taught in (link to Wikipedia).

In our previous lesson, another teacher, Brother A, had a nice idea of demonstrating the principle of spreading the gospel. He showed a series of Lego Star Wars figures each taking it in turn to talk to each other, and eventually they spread word to a large group of people. This stuck in our eldest son, A1, who insisted on re-enacting the scene at the start of the lesson but with his large collection of teddy bear dogs. (Our youngest child, A3, who's just 3 years old, tried her best to derail proceedings by smashing the carefully laid out collection of dogs with her own, which she brandished with glee in brutal axe-like fashion. At least it showed that the lesson had something for everyone?...)

Once A1 had finished, we tied this into the scriptures. I like to post scriptural excerpts into a Google Slide file and colour-code them, so that I can easily get someone on the Zoom call to read out a specific part. We have kids from 6 years up taking part in the reading aloud part.

We pointed out how the phrase "open your mouths" gets used three times, and then did the exercise (which was suggested in the CFM manual) where we asked the children to say "I love God" with their mouths shut and then open. 

I then expanded the "dogs sharing the gospel" exercise by doing a quick sketch to illustrate exponential growth. I like to use Google Canvas (a free feature in Google Chrome browsers) as a quick-and-easy whiteboard when it's just me doing the drawing. (If I want other people to join in, then I'll use something else.) I also recently invested in a cheap Wacom One drawing tablet (just £50 on Amazon.co.uk) to help me sketch ideas for work on team calls, and it also comes in handy on these lessons. I sketched out what would happen if one dog shared the gospel with two dogs, who each tell two further dogs, and so on.

The idea is to show that if you do this for a few rounds, then the numbers build up very quickly. (I also introduced the concept of powers of to the kids, as an appropriate shorthand for these calculations.) I was impressed when A1, after remaining quiet for a few moments, suddenly came up with the correct answer for 2^10 all by himself. Not bad going for an 8 year old. :) A2 asked if you could do powers with 6 instead of 2 (i.e. if each dog could share the gospel with 6 dogs instead of 2). We explored this and asked our Amazon Alexa to calculate 6^10, and found the answer to be 60 million, which is approximately the population of the UK! So if everyone could share the gospel with 6 other people, and this could repeat every month, then you could theoretically share the messsage with everyone in the country within a year. (We didn't get into any of the problems involved in putting this into practice though. Perhaps that's something we can come back to later.)

We then moved onto the next part of the lesson, which focused on the following scriptural excerpt:

This part caught my attention principally due to the bit about building on a rock, since we could potentially demonstrate this through a nice seismology experiment. The experiment illustrates what happens to a building that's built on a soft versus a hard foundation, and I found it in this YouTube video from ScienceMax about earthquakes. (The whole video has lots of other great ideas for earthquake-based experiments, and the one about liquefaction is a really nice one that I used in a lesson a few years ago about Matthew 7:26.)

The night before, I prepared a tray of rice krispie treats (recipe on BBC Food site), and a tray of strawberry jelly, and I bought a few packets of pink wafer biscuits. The kids were asked to build up a tower on each of the surfaces (the hard rice krispie substrate and the wobbly/soft jelly surface) using the wafer biscuits, and then shake the trays to see what happens. The buildings built on jelly should collapse much faster. 

Technically it's a significant over-simplification of the process by which earthquakes damage buildings, and in case you're interested in exploring this further, here are a couple of videos that talk about it in more depth. But for the purposes of illustrating this section of the text, it seemed appropriate.

• TED-Ed video about why buildings collapse in earthquakes. (YouTube link)
• Video about resonance transfer in earthquakes and how soft/hard surfaces are involved. (YouTube link). I really like the part at the end about how it won't be the sturdiest buildings but the smartest that will ultimately survive.

We then did a quick quiz question. I showed the slide below which took three lines from the earlier excerpt (D&C 33:12-13), and replicated them three times, but with two copies containing a mistake. Each person had to look at one of the colour coded blocks and determine the correct line.

 Finally we read Matthew 7:24-27:

24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 

25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 

26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 

27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

My wife then realised that there is a Primary song that is just like this, "The Wise Man and the Foolish Man", and she led the group in singing it together. And that's a wrap.

I hope you find this useful. Do let me know if you have any thoughts or questions, and I'm always open to hearing about different ideas for teaching this content or any additional scientific details. I can be reached through the comments below (which will be moderated) or on Twitter.