A Family Dinner “Game”

A way to talk about faith with your kids is to make family dinner a priority.

But don’t just eat. Play games.

That’s right. To extend your time together as a family, add a “game” to the end of your meal. Here’s a game suggestion that ties to our current Rotation on Daniel and the lions. Make the story come alive! Tell the story dramatically, involving everyone at the table. All you need is a Bible.

Find Daniel 6:3-23. (If you want an easy to read version click here.) One person can be the story teller and everyone else… the characters in the story. To make it easy, there doesn’t have to just be one Daniel and one king – everyone can be Daniel and everyone can be the king. And everyone gets to be lions!

The reader can create voices for the different story characters. How would the bad guys sound? Sort of whispery? (You do this when reading regular books to your kids; why not apply it to reading the Bible.)

For example, in verse 11 it says…

Some of the other royal officials went to where Daniel was staying. They saw him praying and asking God for help.

Ask your family to pretend to be the bad guys. How would they act when they discovered they’d trapped Daniel! Encourage everyone to use their body to tell the story. (The bad guys were probably giving each other high-fives. Yes! We caught him in the act!)

How did Daniel look when he was praying? How did the king react when he heard what he’d done to Daniel? How did the lions look before Daniel was thrown into their den? How did they look when Daniel was among them? (Mouths closed!)

Finish up your “game” with a prayer. (It’s what Daniel probably did.)

Photo credits:
Daniel with lions a photo of a painting by Robert Edward Weaver (c. 1952), is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Kid being a lion by Nathan, who licensed this photo on Flickr under a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 License.