Devotionals with toddlers

One of my most important goals with my little guy is to teach him about Jesus and our faith!  I want him to know the Lord, that He loves us, died for our sins, wants a personal relationship with us.  The big question now is HOW do you go about teaching a 15 month old these things?  Well, besides us teaching him to pray with our daily prayers and our mealtime prayers, I wanted to try doing some kind of devotional with Jesse.  After looking online for some kind of devotional book geared for little, little guys, I drew a blank!  I found nothing that I really liked or felt led to use.

Now enter in awesome book purchased from Target...

The DH and I were at Target and came across this very precious bedtime prayer board book

This sweet book is essentially a devotional and just what I was looking for.  Each devotion has a corresponding bible verse and a little prayer.  The devotions are simple and rhyming and there are some adorable illustrations on each page.  

Ok, now the question became "how to I implement the devotions with my son - besides just reading it like a regular book?"

Here is how we're making it work so far...

• We are focusing on a devotional for at least a week
• I turned the rhyming devotion into a song
• I'm teaching my son American Sign Language (ASL), so I learned several signs from each line and sign and sing the devotion
• I wrote the devotional with dry erase marker on an 8x10 empty picture frame (mainly for myself so I could memorize the devotion without referring to the book) and hung it in a high traffic area (our dining room).  

This is what my picture frame devotional looks like so far.  I want to either put some neutral decorative paper in the frame or even print up the devotional with some of my scrapbook software.  I've even considered scanning the devotional from the book and printing it out so that it has the cute illustrations in my frame.  But for now, this works and allows me to reference the devotional frequently with my son.  I put the short prayer from the book in a different color so that I can easily see it and so it breaks up the devotional and the song.  I put a song that I wanted to teach Jesse on there at the bottom and we usually sing that after we sing the devotional.  

So, "how is the devotional working so far?" you may ask...

Well, using the signs (ASL) really helped me memorize the devotional and I loved that the devotional I chose to start with had a few signs we already were practicing.  I've noticed that when I sing the devotional, Jesse tries to sign along with me and hums along.  I've also been singing it when Jesse is crying or upset (because the devotional is about how God will comfort you when you're sad) and it's worked as a nice distraction and an applicable lesson!  In all, I'd say it's working wonderfully and I plan on continuing my Toddler Devotionals!!