I love family dinners. I enjoy them during the week with my family and I love my Sunday night dinners with my sister and her family (when we have dinner for four adults and five kids!!) I love cooking and sitting down with people I love enjoying good food and great conversation.

Last week, I tried something new at dinner with my family. We talked about what was important to us and discussed our family values. Again, you wouldn’t think the kids would find this fun, but boy, they did! They had lots of ideas and I quickly wrote them all down as we were talking. I wanted to create a visual representation of these values and created the word cloud above. I used this word cloud site  (I like it because you can customize the shape and save a version for printing). It was super fun, try it.

There are a few other things that we’ve used to create fun family dinners:

1. What are you grateful for? We always start off our dinner with this great question (see my post here on this)

2. We also have the Melissa & Doug Family Dinner Box of Questions. The questions are terrific and the kids love taking turns reading them. We’ve had many fun conversations that have started from these questions.

3. There are a couple of great books on the family dinner in case you wanted even more ideas and inspiration: Laurie David’s The Family Dinner: Great ways to connect with your kids one meal at a time. And, Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story (Laurie has a great website and Jenny’s blog is amazing.)

4. Laurie David’s work is so inspiring that the Huffington Post publishes a Family Dinner Download every week for conversation starters, you can view them here.

Enjoy your dinners!!