Evaluating our School Year: Prayer

This post is part of a series I'm doing as a way to evaluate our school year.  I am covering each subject, describing what we did; what worked for us and what didn't work; and detailing any changes I plan to make.  I find this process so helpful as I finish out our year and before I begin to plan for our next year.  

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Prayer

WHAT WE DID:
Directly following our Bible time, we had a prayer time together.  This was a really sweet time for us each morning, and until this year, I hadn't attempted it.  Sure, we have always prayed before each mealtime, but we hadn't set aside a prayer time like this.  Right now all of our kids are old enough that we are able to do this, and it was such a welcome addition to our mornings.

Most days I would simply ask, "What can we pray for today?" and often the kids would remember the various needs of family members and friends, needs in our own home or in the world.  We prayed a LOT for the refugees this year (thank you, my sweet Audra, who wanted to pray for them every.single.morning).  And we prayed a lot for the presidential candidates.  We also prayed for our Compassion kids.

Since our prayer time followed our Bible time, we would also often pray about what we'd read or learned.  Sometimes by that time we'd already had a rough morning with bickering or a stressed mommy, and one of my kids would pipe up, "We could pray for peace for the rest of our school day."  And so we did.

I wrote all of these prayer requests down on our morning time sheet for that day.

Then each of us would select one or two things to cover in prayer, and we prayed for 5-10 minutes.

At some point during the year I encouraged the kids to begin their prayers with a "Thank You, God, that You are ___________ " type-praise.  I want them to learn to come before God with adoration and praise for Who He is, not just to Him for something.  So this was a good, hopefully habit-forming practice that we kept up.  I actually have made a note on my planning list for this next year to cover some of the attributes of God in our morning time, but I haven't fleshed that out yet.  (Does anyone know any good resources for that?)

We will continue to do prayer the same way next year!