LearningCycles series 101 Ways to Pray Creative Activities for Teaching about Prayer

The LearningCycles series offers a creative approach to faith formation based on different learning styles, appropriate for K-5th graders.  Each LearningCycles unit generally includes seven workshops: Art, Story & Games, Drama & Activity, Music, Kitchen, Movie, and Publishing.  This series works well for whole family/intergenerational catechesis and is a great basis for grandparent camps or other vacation bible schools.

At the most basic level, prayer is a conversation or communication with God. At times it can be difficult to know how to enter into this conversation between ourselves and God. We think prayer needs to look or sound like the beautiful, well-written prayers we hear in Mass or read in books designed for worship, and we forget that we can be completely ourselves in prayer—with our messiness, doubts, and all! 

As with any relationship in our lives, we need to learn how to spend time with God and bask in God’s love for us. Prayer, like any communication, is a two-way street. It is not only a time to express our needs and desires but also to find ways to be still and silent and open to what we might hear. This LearningCycle offers many kinds of prayer experiences. The hope is not only to learn different ways of praying but to learn how to make prayer a part of your daily life.

• Art Workshop - Making prayer beads and learning about rosaries to help us find ways to focus our minds on prayer.
• Publishing Workshop - Talk about prayer flags and make some of your own as a way to learn the ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) model, which describes different types of prayer.
• Drama Workshop - Engage in prayer walks and with labyrinths and mandalas as a way to think about praying with our bodies or in more embodied ways.
• Movie Workshop - Using clips from different films to illustrate various ways of praying and to address that “right” or “wrong” ways of praying are very unhelpful categories as we begin to engage in prayer. (Supporting DVDs can be found for sale here.)
• Story Workshop - Employing yoga, meditation, and icons as tools to help us enter into the quiet of prayer.
• Kitchen Workshop - Bake pretzels and learn their historical connection to prayer and church history. This workshop also touches on the theme of praying with and for other people.
• Music Workshop - Sing hymns and chants to learn about collective prayer and to explore one way that we often pray collectively in Mass.
• Knitting Workshop (Bonus) - Learn about prayer shawls and engage in the practice of knitting as a way to emphasize that we can talk to God at any time, through many methods.

Click to find additional resources for use with this unit.