Children

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Preschoolers and Prayer
Preschoolers are so much fun to teach! Their curiosity and zeal for life are contagious! One can’t help but love them! Oh the stories we could tell about things our kids have said over the years, but that will be another article entirely.
After teaching in Children's Church and Sunday school for over 25 years, my husband and I have developed a simple way to teach 4 and 5 year olds to care for others and to turn to God in prayer. Prayer is just one of the fundamentals preschoolers should be introduced to, yet so vital. Children need to know they can talk to God, that He hears and that He does answer. They will need to know how to pray when they ask the Savior to forgive them of their sins and be the Lord of their lives. They will need to know how to pray when the decisions and trials of life come their way as they do to us all. We make it a point to teach and reinforce the fundamentals of prayer each week and we hope our plan can be beneficial to you and your class as well.
Here is our simple plan:
1. Repetition - The word REPETITION sometimes has a bad connotation but when it coming to learning, no method is more effective. Make yourself a simple agenda including prayer and use it each time you meet. Children this age thrive on repetition. So don’t worry about them getting bored with it.
2. Teach -Before we pray, we always talk about what prayer is and answer the many questions that the students might wonder about. Who are we talking to? Do we have to close our eyes and bow our heads? We bow our heads and close our eyes, but how do other people pray? Looking up to heaven, lying down, on their knees? Can God hear us if we turn out the lights? Can God hear us if we are in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean? Can God hear us if we take a rocket ship to the moon? Does God ever sleep and miss our prayers?
3. Sing-Do you still remember the ABC song from school? While it is a proven fact that we remember facts set to music- so take advantage of it! We always sing a prayer song that reinforces the fact that God always hears and answers our prayers. Sometimes He says “Yes”, sometimes He says “No” or sometimes He says “wait”, but He always hears and answers.
4. Share-We next share who we need to pray for. I use my laptop to share pictures of people in our church who are in need of prayer. If you don’t have a laptop use photographs or the church directory. Usually these are older adults in the church who the kids might not recognize by name but after they see their faces - they don’t forget! Then the kids share their personal needs like their latest booboos, their desire for a white horse, or that their dog died (sometimes multiple times). The point is to show them God cares about their every need.
5. Model Prayer-Lastly, we lead them in prayer to our Heavenly Father. They bow their heads and close their little eyes now knowing that God hears and cares about them as well as the needs of others. You might want to ask the children to pray for one thing out loud and go around the room. The point however is to model what prayer is even if they aren’t ready to pray out loud themselves or not in front of others.
Sometimes we make cards or banners for those we have been praying for. Many of the receivers of our artwork have shared how special such tokens of kindness, prayer and mercy mean to them. The cards are a blessing to the recipient as well as a teaching tool for the young ones.
We don’t often see dramatic spiritual development with ones so young but that is OK. We are laying the foundation for spiritual growth, each block being a basic Biblical truth all children need to know: that God is the creator, God loves us, God hears us, God answers us, and God sent His Son Jesus to take our punishment and on and on. Our work is simple but it is not insignificant. Remember, Jesus loves the little children and we have so much to learn from them.

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