I think I’ve kvetched before about how hard it is to plan meaningful FHEs with older kids. 
I’m still struggling with it, but last night went pretty well, so I thought I’d share:
I asked everyone to imagine that they were going to teach a lesson at church about repentance and to think of an object lesson that they could use.
We all shared our ideas. And then we critiqued them. In other words, we talked about which elements of the object lesson lined up with the idea of sin –> repentance –> atonement, and which elements could be misleading. For example, my idea was to talk about getting a cut and then putting goo (What do you call that stuff? In our house, everything is just “goo” or “dust.”) and a band-aid on it, and how, through a process you don’t understand and couldn’t consciously replicate yourself, the skin looks good as new in a week. This led to an interesting discussion about how you might be tempted to ignore tiny cuts (no goo or band-aid because it is so small), but you shouldn’t because ebola. As in: even tiny sins can sometimes cause big problems down the road if you aren’t careful. As for the critique, my son pointed out that healing a cut takes a long time, but forgiveness does not necessarily. And sometimes skin scars, but God’s forgiveness is complete. We each shared and critiqued our object lessons and my husband and I added in info about the repentance process and atonement as we went.
It was a great conversation that gave us several different perspectives on the idea of repentance and also modeled and practiced critical engagement. For once, I was pleased. Now if, in the comments, y’all could just provide me 51 more zero-prep, engaging, meaningful lessons like this, I’d be set.
For what little it’s worth, we expanded our FHE approach to add things that are important to us as a family beyond gospel lessons. We use a laminated map of the world and add two or three dots each each as we learn about where the temples of the world are… sometimes planning our refreshments around the culture of one of the places where that week’s temples are. Manners are also very important to us, so we added a weekly discussion about things we found in the book “How to Raise a Gentleman” by ( http://www.amazon.com/Raise-Gentleman-Revised-Updated-Gentlemanners/dp/1401604617) to get our son thinking about these things from a young age. Those manner discussions often took over then entire time, especially when coupled with applicable scriptures.
Nicely done. Let the kids contribute and think in the process.
Not quite zero preparation, but I have used Kaimi’s Awesomest Youth Object Lesson more than a few times. The pill version from http://www.thinkgeek.com worked great for us.
“And sometimes skin scars, but God’s forgiveness is complete”
While the kid’s absolutely right, the scarring analogy is useful. God can completely forgive us of our sins, but the consequences of sin can’t always be repaired. Certainly not in this life, anyway. So while the skin heals, the scar can be disfiguring and remain so until the resurrection.
Sounds like a really good FHE.
Great idea! We have found ourselves using Ted talks and resulting discussion which have been very engaging for our older kids and are about the right length. We find lots of ways to shoe horn in gospel and moral discussions in ways that feel real and relevent. Beyond having an active eye open for good ones to use, the preperation then turns out to be very minimal.