Saturday, March 18, 2017

Printing-Mimicking Activities

I'm having fun planning the activities that go along with the lesson I'm teaching this Sunday. The printing of the Book of Mormon isn't very exciting or interesting as a topic, but the activities described in the lesson plan should be engaging enough to grasp even our rambunctious boys' attention. One of the activities is to arrange letter tiles into the phrase "The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ" (without the colon), and another is to fold a sheet of paper with seemingly randomly arranged letters on it in such a way that, after you've folded and trimmed the paper, you're left with a booklet with the pages accurately numbered.

These two activities partially depict the early printing process of arranging letter stamps in a printing press, then stamping multiple pages at once onto large pages which are then folded and cut into booklets which are then all sewn together into a book. It's an amazing process, and it should be fun to partially duplicate.

These activities are mainly designed to give the kids something fun to do that can be related to the lesson, but as I explain how these activities relate to the lesson, it should help teach the kids how much thought and work went into printing the Book of Mormon, which may help increase our gratitude for it. It wasn't easy for the early saints to translate and print the Book of Mormon, but I'm sure glad they did, and I think the kids will have fun learning how they did it.

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