Teaching your children how to pray can be a daunting task. While it’s good eventually to learn how to pray in our own words, an active prayer life starts with committing some prayers to memory.
The best place to start is with common prayers for children that can be easily memorized. Children who are making their First Communion should have memorized most of the following prayers, while the Grace Before Meals and the Guardian Angel Prayer are prayers that even very young children can learn by repeating them daily.
1. The Sign of the Cross
The Sign of the Cross is the most basic Catholic prayer, though we don’t often think of it that way. We should teach our children to say it with reverence before and after their other prayers.
The most common problem that children have in learning the Sign of the Cross is using their left hand instead of their right; the second most common is touching their right shoulder before the left. While the latter is the correct way for Eastern Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, to make the Sign of the Cross, Latin Rite Catholics make the Sign of the Cross by touching their left shoulder first.
