Praying for sad situations

Children can really identify with a sense of sadness and, as a fact of life, sad things happen- in our lives, in the lives of people we know and in the world as a whole.  Here is a prayer station to help children (especially younger ones) to pray that God will bring joy and happiness to those experiencing times of sadness.  We're going to use it next term in one of our lessons with the 3-5s, but I wanted to road test it first!

I got some thin, sheer ribbon and attached lengths of it to the spokes of an old umbrella.  Then I stapled some blue raindrop shapes to each ribbon..

You need some way of balancing the umbrella in order to perform the prayer activity.  When working with a small group, the leader could hold it but balancing it on a chair also seems to work!

Children can then think of someone who is sad, or a sad situation in the world and ask God to bring them joy.  As a symbol of their prayer they can then draw a smiley face on a circular sticker and stick it onto a raindrop...

I did think of using smiley face stickers, but actually having to draw a face on the circle makes the children more directly involved in the prayer.  Now we just have to wait and see how this works in practice!