"The Family: A Proclamation to the World" songs

I love The Family: A Proclamation to the World. I love the simple, inspired doctrines it teaches and the clear way it sets out eternal truth. Last year, during our morning devotional time, we decided to memorize it as a family.

When we memorized our church's Articles of Faith, we found that using the Article of Faith songs from the Children's Songbook made it easier for everyone. We like to sing together, and music has the added bonus of getting caught in your head often! :) So, I looked online and found that a few people had set the Family Proclamation to music, but none of the songs I found fit my requirements for a good "memorization aid" song. What I wanted was:

• The Proclamation divided up into shorter sections as songs that could stand alone
• Each section to flow into the next, so that the sections could be sung as one large unit if desired (the Articles of Faith songs work this way—you can sing one at a time, or all 13 together)
• The words to take priority: that is, they would be sung naturally, as you would speak them. I didn't want drawn-out syllables or awkward pauses in service of the music to obscure the important meanings of the words. And I wanted us to learn the exact words in all their density and power, unabbreviated and unconstrained.

After some thought, I decided that I would have to write these songs myself. I made each paragraph of the Proclamation into its own song. I'm no Janice Kapp Perry, but I have some background in composition (I was a music major in college and wrote a set of Art Songs to words of T.S. Eliot for my Honors Thesis) so I thought it was worth a try.

I tried to make the melodies simple enough for children to sing or hum, but since I was committed to making the song rhythms follow the rhythms of natural speech, there are a few places where I had to use unconventional or changing time signatures (the Proclamation, obviously, was NOT written with a nice ABAB form in mind. I could have wished for it to say, "The family is good/ Do what you should" or something, instead of "We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed." But it's better the way it is.) :) And I suppose the types of melodies that appeal to me are not always the most straightforward, tonal ones, so I can't promise that everyone will like them.

However, with all that said, these songs were a great success for us in memorizing The Family: A Proclamation to the World. We learned it one paragraph at a time until we could sing (and say) the Proclamation all the way through. Paragraph 7, which is the longest song, is also my favorite (with Paragraph 6 a close second). Over a year later, we can still remember the words we memorized, and judging by the humming I overhear from the children, the songs are often running through all of our heads. I don't know if I can adequately describe how nice it is to have "Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ" ringing in your ears—rather than whatever other mindless lyric could be stuck in there. :)

I wrote these songs with only my little family in mind, but as I've thought it over, I've decided that maybe someone else struggling to memorize the Family Proclamation will find them useful. I've included them in three formats below: videos of my family singing each paragraph in turn (the little girls don't know it very well, but they are cute), audio files of just the accompaniment to each song, and .pdfs of the sheet music if you want to print it out for playing on the piano or following along with the audio files.

I hope these songs are helpful to someone! I can testify that studying and memorizing these words has been a great blessing to me and to my children, and I'm so happy we did it!

(I wrote more about our experience memorizing the proclamation, and some things it taught me, on my friend Montserrat's blog. You can find those posts here and here.)

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Here are the audio files of just the accompaniment (no words) to the songs.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World songs, audio files:

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And here are the .pdfs if you want to download the sheet music.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World songs, sheet music:

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Paragraph 9 sheet music

LDS Family History Library Field Trip

We went on a field trip to the LDS Family History Library in downtown Salt Lake. You can arrange for a tour here. We had such a great time! Everyone was so nice. It would have been easier to go with just the older children, of course, but no one acted mad at the little ones, and there were several areas/activities designed for smaller children, so it was fine.

There's a station where you can put your face into old photos like this one. The children liked that a lot.

After we watched some introductory videos and looked around a bit, some of the sweet lady senior missionaries played with the little girls and gave them pages to color, etc., while other missionaries helped the older boys look up stories of their ancestors. They managed to make the boys feel really competent and smart with the computers, while simultaneously teaching them how to use the software. :)

I wanted the boys (and me) to learn how to look up stuff on microfilm, so the missionaries showed us that, every step: looking up records on the computer, and finding the numbers, and going into the stacks, and threading the film on the machine and so forth, and then they even showed how to download the records you find onto a flash drive or print them. The boys LOVED it. And there are tons of records there that aren't digitized online. So if you can't find anything on a specific person online, but you know something about them, you can often go to the library and search through marriage records or death certificates or whatever on the microfilm. It has always seemed impossibly intimidating to me before, but the ladies there were so nice, I felt like I could totally do it. Next time we go, we will bring specific names to work on. They help you through it so calmly, I loved it!

Sebastian was looking up names in Sam's line back quite a way, and he found someone that died at Winter Quarters, which he noticed and thought was interesting, so then he was clicking on "stories" under that name, and we found such a cool story about this ancestor who knew Joseph Smith, and it had all these funny little details like "Joseph always rode a black horse and Hyrum always rode a white horse" and things like that. It was all stuff Sebby could have found on the computer at home, but he didn't know how, and it was so much more rewarding for him to have the missionary sitting next to him saying, "Wow! Look what you found! This is so amazing, can you believe this is your grandpa? You have his blood in your veins!" and so forth. It made Seb feel so special and grown-up, I could tell. I could just see him getting excited about what else he might find.

Another cool thing you can do at the Family History Library (or the other family history centers) is print out a large fan chart or a name cloud. We didn't do that this time, since we'd already done it another time, but we love these charts. If you just want to print out a regular letter-sized version of them, you can go to this site here and log in with a family search account. I love looking at our ancestors' names (common and uncommon!) and I think the fan charts are really beautiful.

Anyway, it was a great field trip, and we are dying to go back sometime—maybe with a more specific agenda this time.

Inherited Traits chart

We had a fun time learning some genealogy as part of this unit. We asked the children's grandparents on both sides about some of their traits, and then tried to determine where we got some of our own traits based on that. 

From what we read, this is not really a very accurate way of looking at traits. I guess even the traits that are typically thought of as being determined by one gene (like attached vs unattached earlobes) , scientists are finding, are actually more complicated and less easily categorized than that. But, finding out if you can roll your tongue or not is a time-honored tradition in genetics classes, so we did this anyway. And we liked it. 

Here are some of the traits we surveyed (dominant traits are listed first):

• Unattached vs attached earlobes
• Can roll tongue into U-shape vs can't
• No widow's peak vs widow's peak
• Brown vs light (green or blue) eyes
• Index finger shorter than ring finger vs opposite
• Dark hair vs light hair
• Non-red vs red hair
• Curly hair vs straight hair

Family Traits activity

This was an activity I thought of to show how different combinations of traits can produce such differing results in siblings. There are several variations of this idea online, but nothing exactly like what I wanted, so I came up with this spreadsheet for our use. It's vastly simplified from real life, of course, but it was still fun to do.

We started out with a master list of alleles, and which were dominant and which were recessive.

Then I drew about eight different "parents." If Sam hadn't been so busy, I would have had him draw them, and then we would have had something worth sharing here. But since the focus was more on individual traits than a lovely artistic whole, it worked out okay. I made the parents very exaggated-ly have their phenotypes (big nose, hair color, etc.) and then I wrote their genotypes on the page so you could tell if they were homozygous or heterozygous.

Then we put tape on coins to show D for dominant and R for recessive. (You could just say "heads is dominant" or whatever, but actually putting the letters on helped make it more clear, I thought.)

Each set of parents had six "children." I made a spreadsheet with a list of all the alleles for each child, plus a place to write the genotypes and circle the phenotypes. Then there was a large space to draw the phenotypes for each child.

To make your "family," you would go through the following steps:

1. Choose (at random) two parents from the "parents" pile.
2. Flip a coin to determine the first child's sex. (E.g., assign female to heads/"D" and male to tails/"R")
3. Check the genotypes of the parents. If either parent is homozygous dominant, write down one dominant allele for the child to inherit. If either parent is homozygous recessive, write down one recessive allele for the child. If a parent is heterozygous, flip a coin to see which allele the child will inherit. (So, if both parents are heterozygous, flip the coin twice to see which two alleles the child gets.)
4. Once the genotype for the child is determined, circle the phenotype.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 for each trait on the list.
6. Draw what the child will look like.
7. Repeat steps 2-6 for each child of these parents.

Even though it's a little bit involved, this isn't hard to do once you understand what you're doing. I had the children work in pairs so the bigs could help the littles, but everyone had fun flipping the coins and drawing the results.

Two related videos we enjoyed:

What is a gene?

Which genetic traits are dominant?