Tag: 8-11

Healing Board Prayers

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This is an easy and very visual way to help children to pray for healing, for themselves and others.

You will need: A flattened cardboard box or a board, plasters (fabric plasters are best to write on), felt tip pens.

Having talked about Jesus’ healing miracles, we set up a board that the children could use every week to pray for those who need healing.  We wrote words from Luke 6:19 about Jesus healing the sick at the top of the board and then encouraged children to write on plasters the names of those they knew who were ill.  They then stuck the plasters to the board as a sign of their prayer to God for healing.  This is a very popular prayer station!

Easter: Rolling Egg Paintings

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Here’s a great activity we did that can help children to engage with the New Life theme of Easter: butterflies painted with rolling eggs!  I like the idea of rolling eggs symbolising the stone that rolled away from the tomb at Easter, so that was an added bonus that we could talk about to the children who came along. This was especially popular with boys- maybe something to do with the high activity level!

You will need: A deep sided tray, plastic Easter eggs (that you can put something inside!), marbles, paint, paper butterfly shapes.

Place your paper shape inside the tray.

Put a marble inside each egg you are going to use to paint with.  This will give it a little more weight.  Add a few spots of paint to the paper (less really is more in this case!).  Now shake the tray from side to side so that the eggs roll across the paint and decorate the paper.

The finished painting!

Try to wipe the eggs between paintings.

We also tried some crosses and egg shapes so that we could maintain the ‘New Life’ theme and also speak about Good Friday and the cross leading to a new start for Christians.

Prayer Chatterboxes

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Children seem to love playing with these origami ‘fortune tellers’ or ‘chatterboxes’ and I started to think about how we could use them for prayer…

We experimented at church and at our school lunctime club and they went down very well!

This activity needs to be done in groups of 2 or 3 and you can print off versions of the prayer chatterbox by clicking below. If you’re not sure how to make them get a child to show you how!  When children have chosen their colour and number, their partner lifts the flap to see what they have to pray for:   Please, thanks, sorry, friends, family.  Sorry prayers can be said silently and finished with a spoken Amen so that we know it’s time to swap turns!

A printable version can be found here.  When they’ve tested them out, challenge children to make their own version.