Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

Here's a great idea you can use at home to help children pray and it only costs £1! I've always loved the idea of teaspoon prayers- 'tsp' being the abbreviation of 'teaspoon' in recipes but also being the initial letters of 'thanks, sorry and please', three things we can encourage children to pray about.  I like things that stick in the head! I got a pack of small spoons from the pound shop and wrote t or s or p on each one with a permanent marker.  Then I put them in a jar.  Children can take a spoon at random from the jar and then pray a 'thanks', 'sorry' or 'please' prayer according to the letter on their spoon.

We've had our prayer board  up for at least a year and a half now, so it's time to have a little change round!  The knowledge that God listens to us and answers our prayers is fundamental to what we are teaching the children, though, so we want to make sure that, whatever replaces it gives the children the chance to celebrate answered prayer. This is our new board... I found some garden netting at Asda (£1 for A LOT!) and stapled some of it over some shiny blue fabric Children can write or draw their prayers on paper slips and poke them through the netting as a symbol of putting them into God's hands (He can hold the prayers as in a net).  Then, when the prayers have been answered, children can unroll them and pin them to a washing line next to the board.  I'm just hoping that no one manages to pull hard enough on the next to dislodge all my staples!!

This is an easy way to get children to pray for others and will appeal to the kinaesthetic learners!  It's similar to the  thank you tower  idea we use with the 3-5s but involves naming those things and places we'd like God to bless. All you need is Duplo blocks, thin labels and pens/ pencils. Get the children to write names on labels, stick them on a block and build them into a tower. Each time they add a block to the tower they should ask God to bless that person or place.  Each visible side of the block can be labelled.  How many blessings can you build into your tower?

After hearing the story of Bartimaus, we discussed the fact that Jesus wanted to help us and that, like Bartimaus did, we could reach out and ask him. We asked the children to think of an area in their lives where they felt they needed some help.  They then drew around their hand to symbolise reaching out and, if they wanted to, wrote or drew inside what they wanted Jesus to help them with.  It was actually quite powerful and the children could have spent much longer on it!   Here are some examples:

Children write or draw their prayer requests and pin them to the board under 'prayer requests'.  When the prayers have been answered they are moved and pinned to the 'answered prayer' side of the board.  Every week we have answered prayers and the children love to see the visual extent of what's been going on!