This week we heard from Wendy who recently started working for the Methodist Church in North Yorkshire as a primary schools chaplain. Wendy shared,
One of my schools was considering setting up some small “prayer spaces” in their classrooms, but I was concerned that they wouldn’t get used in that setting. It’s a tiny village school (only 30 children) with two classrooms, one upstairs, one downstairs.
I thought it would be good to set up a prayer space where the children could access it independently during their free time, while being somewhere with a light touch of supervision so that it was safe, treated appropriately etc.
The only place we could think of was an under-used space that was under the stairs! It’s slightly off the main route into the classrooms and is through a glass screen from the office, so ticked all the boxes.
It’s going to be a permanent prayer space and is now onto it’s 3rd set of prayer activities. I’m hoping that, eventually, I’ll be able to involve the children in devising and choosing which prayer activities are used, once they’ve had experience of a number of different styles and topics etc.
Photo of it’s first incarnation attached – they were keen to get started quickly, so I made do with a rather “busy” tablecloth, as it was the only one I could find at short notice! There’s a simple blue one there now.
It’s been wonderful to see how quickly the children have taken to it.
The head teacher noticed a little boy from Y1 take a bead, hold it in his hand and put it in the bowl. She asked him if he wouldn’t mind telling her why and he said that he’d been struggling with understanding a new maths topic, so he’d said a prayer to ask God to help him.
Simple but beautiful!