When I was growing up my parents had a tradition that for various unique/monumental occasions, we had a special plate that one of us would get to use at dinner. It was gold in color and much more fancy than the other dishes they used for every day.
So for things like a birthday, or a great report card…things like that, we were “rewarded” with the special plate at dinner. We all wanted it and loved having the honor of eating off of it!
It is a tradition that I wanted to carry on with my own kids, but honestly, I hadn’t taken the time to find a special plate that would work for such occasions.
Then I was contacted by #Flyby Promotions about a new product they had for review called the Family Honor Plate. It was a kit that had everything available to paint a plate together that could be used to recognize honorable traits in your kids.
Around the edge of the plate are listed the Fruits of the Spirit. Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-control.
The idea behind using the plate is simple. Watch for those times when your kids are displaying one of the Fruits of the Spirit and then they get the Honor Plate to use that day. But even beyond that, they encourage you to have your kids watch for those traits in other family members and “gift” the plate when it is appropriate!
What a wonderful way for us parents to be watching, but also for our kids to be learning how to see and recognize those fruits as well.
The kit comes with everything you need to paint the plate. We sat down as a family to come up with a design and color pattern. As you can see from the top picture, we used painters tape to mark off equal sections and it worked pretty well!
Then you start painting, making sure to clean your brush well between each color. I will say that for some reason my red and purple especially were very thick upon opening. Almost to the point that I couldn’t spread them with the brush. I was really hoping that when we baked the plate the brush strokes would soften and even out.
But as you can see from the finished picture below, that didn’t happen. So my only piece of advice would be to not paint on several coats and keep it as thin as possible! I have done other painted pottery pieces before and if you didn’t have several coats, the color after baking would be very light. In this case, the color after baking was just the same as before baking!
Once you are done painting, you let it dry for a period of time and then they have baking instructions on how to cure your plate. Once it has baked and cooled you can use it to eat on!
Our family is going to have fun using this plate over and over again as we watch for honorable characteristics in one another!
In addition, I was sent these fun Table Tyme Discussion cards. Every day has a new question that helps encourage conversation around the dinner table!
Even though my plate didn’t turn out “perfect”, we had a lot of fun planning how to paint it and discussing how we were going to be using it. I think this would be a wonderful project for any family and a great way to encourage kids to be aware of and watching for the fruits of the spirit!!
[youtube]https://youtu.be/dwLlnS3t0LI[/youtube]
I was sent the Family Honor Plate for free to complete and review. All opinions expressed are my own!