The End?

Last week our family finally met a big goal we had set…

We read the Book of Mormon completely as a family.

We started on February 28, 2011 and finished on April 22, 2012.

That’s 420 days to read 531 pages, or an average of 1.26 pages per day.

We would have finished it much quicker if we had actually read every day. We would go through spurts on reading daily. But we finally finish it!

This is what worked for us:

Even though some of us have scriptures on our phones or e-readers we used our actual scriptures to read. We want the kidlets to get familiar with the actual book and not just using electronics to look up the scriptures.

Read in the evenings before bedtime for the kidlets. I know so many people read in the morning, but that just doesn’t work for us. Big Daddy doesn’t have a regular start time for work and some days he leaves extremely early in the morning. Oh and I am not a morning person…at all. So the evenings worked best for us.

Always start our reading sessions with prayer.

Don’t have a determined amount to complete each night, we kept at it as long as everyone was willing. There were times when we felt something had been accomplished by reading one verse and other times we were able to read chapter after chapter after chapter.

Take turns reading. We would each read 5 verses. When we started LaLa was a beginning reader and she would only read 1 verse, but as we went on she had worked up to 2 verses. Since Ham is a very beginning reader one of us will read the verse and he would repeat it. On a side note it has been so interesting watching the kidlet’s reading improve as we went along.

Just keep going. When we started we were so vigilant about reading every night. Inevitably life would rear it’s crazy head and we would miss a night…and at times that turned into missing weeks at a time. Instead of starting over we would just keep reading. In the past we would just start over after we had missed reading for so long. I think we read 1st Nephi eleventy-billion times until finally this time we just kept going.

Enjoy the journey. I loved the nights that questions led to discussions about how what we were reading really applied to our lives here and now.

Have a reading chart to mark your reading progress. I think I was just as excited as the kidlets to mark off the chapters as we read.

And when you finish just start all over again.

If you want your own copy of the Book of Mormon you can get one here.