One of the benefits of homeschooling is that it is very easy to work prayer into the day. Every school day, we begin with morning prayers followed by saying a prayer before our lessons. It is a wonderful way to start the day and I really believes it helps me to be more patient than my nature otherwise tends to be.
However, not everyone has the luxury or the desire to homeschool and finding prayer time is probably much more difficult to do as a family. I was wondering if any of you have a consistent routine of morning prayers with school children and what kind of routines you have to make that possible. It would be wonderful if you could share them!
I think that prayer is so important before school because it is a reminder that learning is character forming and the disciplines of learning affect our spiritual life. Learning to be diligent and disciplined even if the desire might not be there is of great value and will serve us all well in our spiritual walks. It is important for us parents to help our children incorporate prayer into their daily lives. I know it can be difficult with how busy we can all be, but it is not only good for our individual spiritual health but our families as a whole. To be united in love for Christ is the most incredible treasure a family can have. So let's seek that treasure and hold on to it!
*Don't forget the links on the right have a variety of crafts and activities to do as a family for various feast and fasting periods. My apologies for not having any recent activities to present.
3 comments:
We are a part of a cottage school, where our son goes two days a week and then I homeschool the other three.
We get ready, eat breakfast and then do prayers as a family. I know that, sometimes, my husband will say a special prayer with our son when he drops him off at school.
I need to get in a better habit of saying a prayer right before we start school. Thanks for the reminder.
When we were in public school, I would awaken the children at their appointed times (different children different times - made the mornings run so much more smoothly) and the first thing I would do with them was to sing morning prayers and prayers before lessons (in the Daily Prayers) with them from the Orthodox Children's Prayer book. Then they would go to do their morning routine of getting ready. I did this with each child.
In the evening after everyone was home we would do our very, very best to make sure we all ate dinner as a family no matter how crazy busy we were (at that time we had 7 children under the roof). We always had prayer together as a family at the evening meal.
Also, I would pray with the children as a part of their bed time routine. This only needed to be done once as they could all gather for evening prayers at the same time unlike the way I ran our mornings. We said prayers for after dinner, prayers for after lessons, and evening prayers.
Anyway, there you have what our family prayer times while we were not homeschooling.
We homeschool, and our first "school" activity is morning prayer. Actually, we do it before we eat, while breakfast is cooking, usually. We gather for prayer, then we get the table ready to eat. We do this on the weekends, too, except for Sunday.
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