Lifes Greatest Miracle Movie Worksheet

Working with the Life's Greatest Miracle Movie Worksheet

Life's Greatest Miracle is a 1975 church-produced film about the birth and ministry of Jesus, originally made for Family Home Evening use in the LDS Church. The accompanying worksheet is typically a question-and-answer guide meant to help families or Sunday School classes process what they've just watched. It's not a formally published academic document, so finding a reliable copy can be frustrating. Most worksheets floating around are scans from photocopied pamphlets dating back decades, which means formatting varies wildly depending on where you got it. I spent a lot of time in the 90s and early 20000s distributing these in primary and youth settings, and the main issue nobody warns you about is that the original worksheet has questions structured around a single continuous playthrough, but most people today watch the film piecemeal or skip ahead. When kids don't see the same sequence, the questions start missing context. For example, question 4 in most versions asks about a specific scene involving the angel appearing to Joseph in a dream, but if you're using the remastered DVD version, the scene runs about 40 seconds shorter than the original VHS release, and kids who caught that difference on tape will blank on the answer. I just kept a VHS reference copy on hand for years so I could point people to the exact timestamp. Now I just give them the scene descriptions alongside the questions.

How to Use the Life's Greatest Miracle Movie Worksheet Effectively

The basic setup is straightforward. You play the film, pause at natural breaks, and have participants answer the corresponding worksheet section. The film runs roughly 125 minutes, so most groups split it across two sessions. The worksheet itself is divided into roughly eight sections, each covering a major segment of the narrative. Here's what actually works versus what tends to fall apart in practice. Print the worksheet double-sided if you can. The original layouts were designed to fit on standard letter-size paper with questions on one side and blank space for answers on the other. Most modern photocopies reverse this or cut off the margins. If you're working from a scan, crop the edges and adjust the scale so the question text isn't smaller than 10-point font, which is what most cheap copiers produce. The film contains several scenes that require handling carefully with younger audiences. The Herod segment, which appears in the first third of the worksheet, includes themes of violence and fear that will confuse or distress children under about seven. I stopped assigning those questions to the younger group and let them work on a separate simpler sheet while the older students handled the full worksheet. It took five minutes to set up and avoided about ten minutes of disruption later.

When you're discussing the worksheet answers, don't rush through the later sections. The final three segments cover the crucifixion and resurrection, and the worksheet questions there assume the viewer has already processed the earlier emotional content. Groups that press through without pausing tend to get shallow answers on the resurrection questions because people are still sitting with whatever the previous scene left them feeling. Twenty minutes of silence after that section is normal and useful, not a sign that something went wrong. Here's a practical workaround for the digitized copies that tend to circulate online. Many of the PDFs you'll find have the questions printed in a narrow column with huge white space next to them because the original layout was landscape and someone scanned it in portrait. The fix is to rotate the page 90 degrees clockwise before printing, which gives you the correct proportions and enough writing space. I learned this the hard way when I printed a batch and every student complained they couldn't fit an answer on the page.

What to Expect from the Content

The worksheet questions are generally factual recall with occasional application prompts. You'll see things like "Who appeared to Joseph in a dream?" followed by "How would you feel if an angel appeared to you?" The factual questions have clear answers in the film. The application questions don't have correct answers and that's the point, but facilitators sometimes treat them like they do and try to steer people toward a specific response. Don't do that. The questions are meant to be personal. One thing the worksheet doesn't address well is the theological differences between denominations. The film is distinctly LDS in its framing, and some questions assume doctrines that other Christian traditions don't share. If you're using this in an interdenominational setting, you'll want to flag that the worksheet reflects one perspective and be prepared to note when a question goes beyond what a general Bible study would cover. I've seen groups skip the entire second half of the worksheet for this reason and just use the first four sections. The film itself is available through LDS Church media channels and through certain Christian video distributors. The worksheet is not officially distributed by the church in digital form, which is why everyone is working from archived copies. If you're creating your own modern version, the structure works fine but the specific questions feel dated. A lot of the language assumes a mid-70s educational context that doesn't land the same way with kids raised on different media. You can adapt it, but you shouldn't treat the existing text as the only valid version.

There are some free scan-based versions online from former teachers who uploaded their copies to personal sites. Search for "Life's Greatest Miracle worksheet pdf" and you'll find a handful. None are official. The quality ranges from readable to barely legible. The ones that are most readable tend to be the ones that were re-typed rather than scanned, which is worth noting because re-typed versions sometimes contain transcription errors in the question text. I once handed out a copy where question 12 read "What did the star lead them to" when the original said "Where did the star lead them." Minor difference but it changed the expected answer format from a location to a verb, and a few kids wrote completely wrong answers because of it.

Life's Greatest Miracle Movie Worksheet for Family Use

If you're using this at home rather than in a group setting, the approach is simpler. Play the film, stop at each section break, and go through the questions together. The whole thing takes about three hours with discussion, so plan accordingly. Most families end up doing it over two evenings. The worksheet works well as a discussion starter rather than a test, and treating it like a quiz tends to kill the mood faster than anything else. The main bottleneck with the worksheet is that it was written for a film that runs longer than some modern edited versions. If you're using a shortened cut, some questions won't match the footage anymore. Check your runtime against a timestamped scene list before you print anything. I keep a simple table of scene start times in each version and reference it whenever someone asks me about a question that doesn't seem to match what they watched. It saves a lot of back-and-forth.