Children & Families

Parents … Here you will find prayers and other resources to help you and your children maintain and develop your faith and understanding of what it means to be an Orthodox Christian. These may be especially helpful on those occasions when you are unable to attend church because of illness or some other circumstance.

The Morning and Evening Prayers for Children are quite simple to understand (even adults might like to use them ) but for younger children we suggest you pray together, perhaps adding them into family prayer time.

If children are not used to saying formal prayers please do not try to make them say all the prayers in one go. Instead select one or two prayers which you might like to share with them and let their use grow naturally. You may print copies of the prayers from the links above.

Also available to print is a copy of the Children’s Guide to the Divine Liturgy. Why not print off a copy and talk about it with your children, so that when you are in church they will have a fuller and clearer idea of what is happening?

We would also encourage you to follow these links to two very good websites for Orthodox children.

You might already be familiar with Let Us Attend: Sunday’s Gospel for Children (https://ww1.antiochian.org/christianeducation/letusattend) because we usually print off some of the colouring sheets and other handouts for the children to use at the Liturgy on Sundays. It has resources for children across the whole school age-range. These are themed around the Gospel for each Sunday of the year. In addition they also have recordings of the gospel reading itself: one for younger children in a simple form and another for older children.

The other very good resource, not only for teaching our Faith but also entertaining your children with interesting things to do is Orthodox Pebbles (https://orthodoxpebbles.com/). This offers a very wide range of enjoyable activities for your kids to do at all times of the year. Please do go and look at it.