Preview: Lenten prayer chain to help kids countdown the days of lent but also build their prayer life
With Lent fast approaching (wasn't it just Christmas?) my mind has turned to ways that we can prepare for Easter as a family. I still feel like my girls (at 4 and 6) are kind of young for the "give something up for Lent" idea since they really have no concept of time. Last year we attempted
the jellybean idea where they add certain color jellybeans to their jar based on good deeds that they do. It worked for awhile, but I will admit I became bad about remembering to reward them with jellybeans. This year I wanted to focus on our prayer life and adding new ways to pray. A few years ago in my catechism class, I had them make a Lent countdown chain and had them write 40 different people/things they wanted to pray for. I decided we would do the same thing only we would create our chain as a family. This would not only help with adding more prayer to our day, but it would also serve as a countdown for my girls so they could see a visual of how many days we had left until Easter.
To start I grabbed five different colors of paper and cut it into strips. The strips were about 1 1/2" long. Each color needed 10 strips and then one color needed 6. I wanted to include the Sundays of Lent too and take this countdown from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday so that when we get to the last strip, my girls know that Easter is the next day.
We each took a color and wrote 10 people we wanted to pray for. We tried to listen to each other and adjust so that we didn't have a lot of repeats. My kindergartner wrote family members and friends whose names she could spell. My four year old needed some extra help and suggestions. On the color with six strips I wrote Hail Mary, Our Father and Glory Be.
Then we worked on putting the strips in a pattern so that everyone's prayer strips were evenly spread out. Then we added the Catholic prayers throughout.
Next, we grabbed the strips and a stapler and started making loops and stapling them together until we had one long chain with all of our prayer requests.
Our plan is to remove one strip each night and pray for that person during our bedtime prayers or say the Catholic memorized prayer together. I'm hoping this will add some variety to our prayer life as it has often just become the girls saying their memorized bedtime prayer and praying for people in our family but it has become the same few people each night. This should allow for more spontaneous prayer and prayers for specific people in our lives.
