Children of The Church: Creating a Special Prayer Space for Children

As our oldest son is preparing for his sacraments of First Reconciliation and First Communion, one thing that we wanted to teach him is how to build and increase his own personal prayer life. We wanted to help him create a special prayer place just for himself. We have a Little Oratory in our home where we will join to pray as a family or where individual people in our family will often go for some quiet time, but we wanted a place that would be his own!

He shares his bedroom with one of his brothers and they have a set of bunk beds where our oldest son sleeps on the top bed. We put up shelves where he can keep books that he is reading and then near the head of his bed we have hung a cross for St. Matthew (his patron saint) and a small Crucifix that he was allowed to pick out all on his own! Also, on his baptism anniversary we gave him the gift of a pillow with the St. Michael prayer, which he loves. He also has his prayer book that he made with Preparing to Receive Jesus from CHC hanging on a little hook so that he made use it to help aid in his personal prayer time.

This prayer book is such a beautiful and simple way for children to learn about and personalize their prayer time. First he learned about praying with "ACTS" standing for "Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving and Supplication". The Preparing to Receive Jesus curriculum gave a great template of what to pray and then our son was able to pick Holy Cards to glue to each page to personalize his prayer book even more. Once he was done arranging his Holy Cards and pages I helped to laminate his book and put on a ring holder to keep it together! He especially loves the pages in which he was able to include photographs of our family and of his favorite saints (he picked St. Michael and St. Jerome!) I hope that his prayer life continues to grow over the course of this next year as he is preparing to receive two very important sacraments.