I think our kids know pretty well some of the things that are important to us, but we felt like we could definitely improve in some specific areas right now.
Our pastor told us how one family had a prayer journal. They used the notebook to write down prayer requests, used it to guide them in praying, and then documented answers to prayer. They are teaching their children that prayer is important to them.
I came home and found a notebook, thinking we should document answered prayer too. We have been teaching our kids about prayer, we pray as a family, and we celebrate (and point out) when God answers prayer.

Each night, we read a story from our devotional Bible. We found one we absolutely love and had a goal to read through it this summer. We are currently reading through it for the third time. Our kids LOVE it and so do we. You can read about it here. After we read our Bible story, we each pull a slip of paper from the prayer jar. As a family, we each pray for one request (sometimes the kids want to pray for other things, too, which is allowed of course!).
I noticed that some of the people were starting to confuse the kids, so I decided to print pictures and write the requests on the back. It has really helped the kids focus on who we're praying for. Now that some requests have been in the jar for a while, the kids actually recognize them (even those that are just handwriting) and can tell us what the request says.
Once a request is prayed over, it goes into a smaller jar. When all the requests have been prayed through, we dump them back in the big jar and start over. If we come to a request that's been answered, we pull it from the jar and hang it on our world map. The map hangs in our dining room and has pictures of various missionaries throughout the world who are serving the Lord.
So cool! We haven't done the prayer jar yet (thank you so much for the info) but have started doing devotional time at dinner time. We use "The Early Reader's Bible" and I really like it. Thanks for the inspiration.
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