Please note: We do not receive any financial compensation for any of the external links that we mention in our posts. We are only including them to share our experience and to make it easier for the reader, if interested, to find the products we used.
This year, we were looking around for a meaningful end-of-the-year gift for our Sunday School students when we came across the prayer rock idea. It is pretty popular in Christian circles and there are many variations of it. It consists of a little rock that the children can place on their pillow to remind them to pray before they go to bed at night and when they wake up in the morning. It goes along with a popular poem, of unknown origin. We found it very cute and we were immediately inspired to create our own Orthodox version, with a shortened instructions poem, a little icon and a set of prayers for the children. We thought that “prayer rocks” might sound a little too cold, so we renamed them into “prayer buddies”.
If you would like to do this craft yourselves, the instructions and resources are provided in this post. All the templates for the printed cards can be found in the PDF file we made for this purpose which you can download for free here.
We had small jewelry boxes (dimensions: 2-5/8 x 1-1/2 x 1H) left over from another project, so the whole craft was based on them. Each kit consisted of the following:
- The box with instructions printed on the cover
- A small laminated icon of Christ
- A small laminated card of children’s morning prayers (from the relevant GOArch web page)
- A small laminated card of children’s evening prayers (from the relevant GOArch web page)
First, we collected some rocks from our backyard, washed them in laundry detergent and water, and let them dry. Then, we drew a smile and some hair on them, using oil-based paint markers. Finally, we glued on some googly eyes, using tacky glue for sturdiness.
For the box cover, we printed the first page of the provided PDF. We used a long metal ruler, a retractable razor knife and a self-healing cutting mat to cut the cards. Please note that it is easier to cut the cards if you don’t go all the way through to the end of the page with the knife – when all the cards are removed, the white border around them should remain intact.
We then glued the instructions on the box cover using Mod Podge, and spread a thin extra layer of Mod Podge on top to seal it.
Finally, we printed and laminated the remaining PDF pages, cut out the icons and prayer cards, and assembled the kits.
Orthodox Pebbles 