Our End-of-Week Prayer – Chosen by the Children

One of the first jobs for our new Worship Council in 2026–27 was to think about how we should end our week together in Celebration Worship.

The children explored a variety of prayers, including acrostic prayers, rhyming prayers and more traditional styles. They discussed which words best reflected our Christian vision, our six values and what we would want to wish for one another as we leave school at the end of the week.

Worship Councillors voted for their favourites and, after sharing their thoughts, chose a prayer that they felt captured what is important to us at Shap:

Our week is done, our work is through.
Thank you, God, for all we do.
Help us be kind, help us care,
And live in harmony everywhere.
Amen

The prayer is now used to close our Celebration Worship each Friday. We particularly love that the children chose words which connect so naturally with our vision of living in harmony and with the kindness, compassion and care we hope they will carry with them beyond the school gates.

 

 

Our School Prayer – Created Together

Our school prayer has a special place in our daily Collective Worship and was created with the children themselves.

Our Worship Council worked with Ruth Hutchings to look carefully at our school prayer, thinking about its words, what prayer means to our school community and how the prayer could better reflect the Christian life of our school. Together, they reviewed and rewrote the prayer, giving our children genuine ownership of the words we now use each day.

The prayer begins:

“May the light of God’s presence shine among us…”

The project did not stop with the words. Andi Taylor from NISCU then worked with our Worship Council to create a beautiful collaborative prayer banner, bringing the words and meaning of the new prayer to life through art.

The banner now forms part of our Collective Worship. As worship begins, it provides a visual focus for our school prayer and is used alongside the lighting of our candle. It is a lovely reminder that this is not simply a prayer for our children, but a prayer that they have helped to shape and make their own.

Through projects like this, our Worship Council has a genuine role in shaping, leading and developing Collective Worship at Shap, helping us ensure that children's voices remain at the heart of our worship.

Our Altar Table – Created by Our School Community

At the heart of our Collective Worship space is our altar table, and even the cloth that covers it tells something of the story of our school community.

When our original altar cloth, which had been used for eight years, became rather well-loved and worn, we decided not simply to buy a new one. Instead, we invited every family to help us create one together.

Each family received a binca cross to decorate at home. There were no identical designs and no 'right' way to create one. Families stitched, sewed and added materials such as felt and buttons, creating designs inspired by Shap CE School, our Christian vision, our Christian values, or something particularly meaningful to their own family.

The individual crosses were then brought back to school and joined together to create our new altar cloth.

We love what it represents. Every cross is different, but together they create something beautiful – a simple visual expression of our vision of living in harmony. It reminds us that every child and every family brings something unique to our school community, while all belong as part of the Shap family.

The altar cloth now sits at the centre of our Collective Worship space, alongside our candle and school prayer banner. It means that when we gather for worship, our families are represented there too.

Catbells Prayer Wall: thanks to our ‘superstar staff’

To launch our ‘people who help us’ theme, we started with our school staff!

We looked at the roles of all of the different people in school, and agreed why we are thankful for them!  They can’t go on our ‘star of the day’ wall, so we classified them as ‘superstar star staff’ and made them the focus of our prayer wall.

We made stars by weaving wool, and whilst weaving we talked about how we could show our gratitude.

We wrote a simple prayer to express our thanks!

 

Outdoor Prayer Space

We have created an outdoor prayer space under our sun shelter!

There are lots of activities that encourage prayer and contemplation, including our map, where we ‘look out into the world’ and prayer for others!

 

The Blessing

• We are learning to sing and sign to 'The Blessing', it is very meaningful throughout the pandemic. You can listen to it via this link.

Chloe, our Teaching Assistant is demonstrating the signing for 'The Blessing'

The Lord’s my Shepherd: praying psalm 23

Reverend Alun and Reverend Fran taught us The Lord’s my Shepherd, Fran’s beautiful singing and Alun’s guitar playing encouraged our children to join in and harmonise... it was special!

Our School Prayer

Worship Council reviewed and refined our school prayer, adding 'Playing' and 'Learning':

May the light of God's presence shine among us,

in our praising,

in our praying,

in our playing,

in or speaking,

in our listening 

and in our learning

AMEN

When we explored our school prayer closely, we found that we didn't really understand the meaning behind 'May the light of God's presence shine among us' so Ruth (NISCU) helped us to see this visually with the use of a darkened hall and torches.  We learned that light can be a symbol of God, ('God is light' 1Jn1:5:Jn9:5) and with the torches we could see the beams of light shining among us, just like God's love

Harvest Prayers

Blencathra' Children decided hat they were thankful for this Harvest time.  They wrote prayers that were shared within the Harvest festival, and also displayed on the church boards at St. Michael's.

KS2 Prayer Spaces with Ruth Evans (NISCU)