How to Make a Simple Prayer Journal for Your Kids {an easy DIY}

Do you keep track of your prayer requests? Today I welcome my friend, Christina Van Starkenburg, to The Better Mom to share an easy DIY project, to help your children create their own prayer journal. -XO, Ruth

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As a Christian mother, one of the things I want to do is to help my children have a strong faith in God. One of the ways I can do that is to teach them how to pray. But, beyond asking God for things or reciting The Lord’s Prayer or Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, I didn’t really know how to pray. And I definitely don’t know how to teach my children how to pray.

Earlier this year I officially became a member of my church, which means I stood up in front of the congregation and told them about my life and how God had brought me to that point. But before I told them my testimony, I spent a lot of time learning about what my denomination believes and how I as a Christian mother can dive even deeper into my faith.

One of the things that came up was my prayer life. Yes, I was praying before each meal and bed, but those prayers consisted of very little other than “thank you for this food I eat” and “please watch me and my family while we sleep.”

That’s when I discovered prayer journaling, which, for those of you who don’t know, is the idea of writing down your prayers. I fell in love. And my prayer life has grown, but more than that, I found a way to teach my boys how to pray.

I sat my four-year-old and one-and-a-half-year-old down around the kitchen table, and together we made their very own prayer journals.

How to Make a Prayer Journal for a Preschooler or Toddler

My boys love painting: paper, chairs, themselves, anything they can put a paintbrush on. So we made their prayer journal from scratch and I let them paint the cover before stapling it to a bunch of white printer paper, but you can always just buy a book for you child.

While they were painting away, I wrote out the steps to an ACTS prayer, which I learned when I was starting my own journal. There are four steps to this type of prayer:

1.  Adoration: When we praise God for his holiness and greatness.

2.  Confession: Where we say sorry to God for the sins we’ve committed.

3.  Thanksgiving: When we say thank you to God for all of the things he has done.

4.  Supplication: When we ask for things we need.

Next we decided what we were going to pray for each day of the week, and I wrote them down on another piece of paper. My boys decided to pray for their Sunday school teachers, parents, daycare provider and her family, friends, each other, the earth, and then their cousins. Then, while my youngest continued to coat himself in paint, his brother grabbed some pencil crayons and drew pictures of everyone he wanted to pray for (we put photographs in the younger one’s book).

Our system isn’t perfect—the littlest one would much rather rip the cover off of his book than look at the pictures while we pray—but I didn’t expect it to be perfect. Praying and learning how to pray is going to be a lifelong thing for my boys. All I want is for them to have a good start, and prayer journaling seems to work for the four-year-old. He likes to work on the pictures in his journal all the time, and he always wants to pull it out before bed so he can use it to pray.

P.S. Check out The Better Mom Prayer Journal to to write out your prayers, make a list of requests and keep track of praises.

Christina Van Starkenburg is happily married to her high school sweetheart Joshua. Together they have survived university, his decision to join the military, and moving across the country when she was seven-months pregnant with their first child. She is now the mother of two wonderful and compassionate little boys, and one of her favourite pastimes is watching them grow and learn about the world around them. Christina is the author of One Tiny Turtle: A Story You Can Colour, a children’s colouring book about a turtle’s quest to find her family after she’s hatched from her egg. Connect with her at www.christinavanstarkenburg.com.