Flowers for Peace
Last week we ran a series of School Prayer Spaces at Saint James’ Church of England Primary School, West End, Southampton. This involved creating interactive activities which the whole school, both children and adults could take part in and gave them a chance to explore life questions and experience a sense of spirituality and stillness in their busy lives.
These activities included:
The Gathering
The Gathering – It was important that everyone was gathered both at the beginning and the end of the session. This helped as a reminder that it was important to move about the space in a quiet, thoughtful manner. The filmy voile also helped to create an air of mystery of what was to come.
Be Still Pods – Here was a reminder that God calls us to be still from time to time, to help us to learn more about ourselves and God. Simple pop up tents provided a space to do that, each furnished with a cushion, a focus lamp and ‘stillness’ image.
It’s amazing that even Reception class children (aged 4 to 5 years) could manage this brief time of stillness, and what was even more amazing was that the Year 6 children (aged 10 to 11 years), despite our concerns that they would be too tall or to ‘cool’ to give it a go, managed to squeeze themselves into the space willingly.
Be still and know that I am God
Tardis Prayers – Here was an opportunity to think about the future. With a Tardis we
could travel forward and see ourselves in 10, 20, 40 years time. Some of the smaller children found the concept of forty years a little difficult to imagine, but they all came up with a suggestion of what they might be doing, what type of person they might be, expressing their hopes and dreams.
In amongst the usual ‘celebrity’ footballers, singers and dancers were the more traditional dreams of becoming a teacher, doctor, lawyer or policeman. The more altruistic souls saw themselves as solving world hunger and peace, as well as being kind and caring to those around them.
Certainly there was no limits to their ambitions with perhaps a future President of the United States or Queen of England here amongst us
My Time Lord is the Lord of Time
Calm Jars – We all know that life, including school, can be stressful. When we are trying to juggle the demands of people, relationships, expectations and pressures, our minds can feel busy and restless and then we start to worry. A Swedish proverbs puts this into perspective, ‘Worry gives small things a big shadow’. In the Bible, however, God often reminds people to be still, to wait and to stay calm whatever the situation.
By gently shaking the jars and watching the glitter swirl and settle they could think about those things in their lives settling down and becoming calmer.
Stress Less – In a similar vein, the ‘stress less’ activity helped to consider the things that stress us out and how to let them go.
Brightly coloured aqua beads (or frogs’ spawn as some referred to it) were the perfect medium to allow everyone the sense of worries and stresses literally falling away or through our fingers.
Quoting from Peter’s first letter, ‘Cast all your worries on God, because he cares for you’ (1 Peter 5:7) helped with the concept that our worries may not automatically disappear, but by sharing them it can make them easier to deal with.
Pray for the World – Our final activity within the prayer space was a chance to think about praying for those people around the world who we were never likely to meet or know anything about, and yet they were undoubtedly just like us.
Using a simple map of the world we explored the differences between people, such as languages, skin colours, religions and beliefs and cultures, but also the fact that we all had one thing in common – we were all human, and therefore had the same needs – the desire to be safe, cared for and loved.
By the end of the week we had managed to cover almost every single country in the world in prayer pebbles, representing the simple prayer we said for the people living there.
If you look closely don’t be concerned that we might not have said a prayer for England – this did have pebbles placed on it, but I kept having to move them slightly so that we could compare the size of our country to others around the world.
One additional activity was our Peace Flowers, which we invited everyone to come back to after school. Here people were invited to create a flower and on the stem write the name of a place, person or situation that they felt needed peace. As you can see it was very popular
Altogether a very enjoyable week, with lots of positive feedback from both the participants and the helpers who led the activities. It’s incredible how spiritual young children can be when we give them the opportunity and space to express this – and it doesn’t do the adults any harm either to be able to do so.
If you want to find out more about Prayer Spaces in School you can visit their website or read more about the Research Project they carried out
