Year 6 Create Resources For Their School Prayer Space
Posted by Rach on 07.07.2011
Having first experienced the "prayer tent" on their school field when they were in year 3, the year 6 pupils at Potters Gate are experts. Over the past 4 years they've watched it grow from that first small tent with a bubble tube, into a transformed classroom with a series of classroom lessons running alongside and then a village of tents back on the field with a range of interactive prayer activities. It's a much anticipated annual event for their school. So this year, I spent an afternoon with them a few weeks ahead of the Orison week at their school to see what they thought should happen next.
We talked through what Orison was, their memories of previous years and what it's all about, before looking at different ways of creating resources and generating ideas. Using a box of interesting objects, the pupils created a series of small activities before I encouraged them to think bigger – what would you put in the prayer space if you weren’t limited by money, space or resources - working on the premise that it’s easier to scale down a big idea than it is to expand a small one. The session finished with a look at how we lay out the space, with pupils deciding which resources to group together into 4 zones and naming the zones.
They had some great ideas, some of them unfortunately a little too “creative” – for example, the suggestion to use a nuclear bomb as part of a prayer to rid the world of evil and people who do bad things! No doubt effective, but perhaps not the prayerful approach we were hoping for? The suggestion of using a helicopter to fly pupils over their local area so they could pray for it was a good one, but our budget doesn’t quite stretch that far and we couldn’t find a way to scale it down, at least not one that health and safety would approve of!
There was one idea that several groups of children suggested. Jane, Julia, Ben, Lara and Ella all wanted a trampoline, suggesting that prayers could be shouted to God as they bounced. We did explore the possibilities of bringing in a bouncy castle as part of the prayer space this year, especially since being on the field made space for this. In the end we decided that it’d probably be more of a distraction than a focus so didn’t bring one but we did scale the idea down and used an exercise trampette. You can download the pdf for that resource from this page.
Another fantastic idea came from one of the girls, who suggested writing prayers on a piece of paper and wrapping it round the stem of a flower, praying that God will answer the prayer as you watch the flower blossom. Lovely idea, but it needed to be modified as we couldn’t imagine many pupils having the patience to watch a flower blossom. The Flotille video, by artist Etienne Cliquet inspired us to use folded paper unfurling as it floated on water to represent the blossoming.
The pupils also inspired us to decorate the prayer space with large garden windmills. This was more effective as we were outside so may well not work for an indoor prayer space but as well as looking great, the children said that the windmills would be “a constant reminder of the presence of God as they moved”
The trampette and blossoming paper resources are now a definite part of our resource list for prayer spaces that we’ll take to other schools. There were loads of other ideas on the list too, which we plan to look at more over the summer while we’ve got time to think about what happens next term.
If you’re returning to a school who’ve already had a prayer space, I’d really recommend getting some of the pupils involved in creating and running the space – maybe a small group of pupils on a planning team, or the Christian Union helping you run it at lunchtimes? It’s great to see the kids applying their creativity and developing their understanding of this sort of prayer too.
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