Activity Days: Service through the Sacrament Bread

     This week we decided to do an activity that would fit into any of the Faith in God categories: Learning and Living the Gospel, Service, and Building Talents. We decided to make homemade bread and use it for the Sacrament on Sunday: Service, learning a new talent, and learning more about the gospel through the Sacrament.

      I love having guests come and teach their unique individual skills and talents to our girls because we all have something very different to offer. This week Emily Flanigan was sweet enough to come and share her talent with our girls. She taught us how to make yummy French bread from scratch. She had prepared her bread recipe and had let it rise before the activity began.

      We began our activity by talking about how we have such a great opportunity to serve by making Sacrament bread. Emily had the girls help her with every step of the process: pre-heating the oven, oiling the pan, separating the dough, twisting it into French bread, and putting it into the oven. The girls had a blast taking turns to do their part in making the bread.

       While the oven preheated and the bread baked, we had a short lesson about the Sacrament. We started off by separating the girls into two teams, giving each a paper and a pencil. We talked about what ingredients go into bread and what those ingredients do. Each team spent 5-10 minutes coming up with their own comparisons for how what the ingredients do in the bread can be likened to the gospel:

Yeast .....................Makes the bread rise................. Christ rose from the dead and has made it possible for us to all rise from the dead one day.
Warm water/milk ...................Bonds the bread/ingredients ................... when we partake of the sacrament each Sunday, we are bonded with Christ
Oil................... Keeps the bread from sticking to the pan ..................... the gospel keeps us from falling to temptation.
Salt................ Adds flavor.......... The Gospel adds flavor to our lives
Sugar...............Makes the yeast work.....................we make the Atonement work when we repent
Flour..................Gives body and substance to the bread ........... Christ sacrificed his body so we could be made whole.

       The girls then shared what they had come up with with each other and some of their ideas were really good! They are very smart. While the bread baked, we went into the hall and talked about the Last Supper when Christ instituted the Sacrament and how one of his last commandments to his apostles before Judas betrayed Him was to love one another. That's obviously a pretty important commandment for Christ to remind His apostles of it at the Last Supper.
        We can show our love by the service we are giving by making the bread for the Sacrament. And just like each ingredient affects the outcome of the bread, so do the promises we make when we partake of the Sacrament make a change/affect in the outcome of who we are.
        We made two loaves of bread so when it finished cooking, we all got to eat a piece of our creation and then save one loaf to take with us on Sunday to use for the Sacrament bread.

         It was a great activity and thanks to our guest teacher, Emily Flanigan, for her expertise and yummy recipe!