How to Help Children Learn the Lord's Prayer

Recently, we have been helping our 5 and 3 year old memorize the Lord's Prayer. Our church says the Prayer together every week and learning it is a way to further involve our children in our church service. Don't misunderstand, I don't believe that by my children learning the Lord's Prayer, it will magically create in them awesome faith or faith at all. It won't solve all our problems or make my kids perfect. But it is a discipline, and a wonderful passage of Scripture they can fall back on.

I started working on it with our 5 year old, but did not expect the 3 year to memorize much. Wow! He surprised me, the 3 year old has the Lord's Prayer better memorized than his older brother.

My husband and I started out by incorporating the Prayer into our bedtime routine with the kids. The kids would say parts of it, but were not excited about it.


And then I discovered this video on YouTube:

We watched the video together several times and my little ones were so excited to say and learn the prayer. This video works on several levels:

1.  First, my kids don't get much screen time, so they are pumped to watch anything. 
2. Second, since they were starting to learn the Prayer, they were motivated to learn the rest of it, to better follow along.
3. They have a better understanding that this is not some silly prayer that mama and daddy say, but is said by the larger body of Christ of so many people from all over the world. 

I only pull the video out every so often now that everyone has it memorized, but it really helped excite our family to learn the Lord's Prayer. And now my children enjoy reciting the Lord's Prayer with our local church on Sundays.