At Friends Schools, Classroom Meeting for Worship is an important way of living out Quaker practice. Children have a need for communion and unity with others, just like adults. Meeting for Worship can help children focus on the wonder, joy, and love in the world around them. It helps people gain perspective on what is important and appreciate the gifts of each individual in the class.

This page provides concrete tools that can be used by elementary teachers in preparing for worship with children. There is information on working with older students and younger students, as well as suggestions for how to talk about centering. The information below is adapted from text by Christie Duncan-Tessmer and is shared with permission from Newtown Friends School.

Begin Planning a Worshipful Experience

Ideally, the experience of a Friends school or college, like the experience of a meeting for worship, is a withdrawal from the world into a spirit-led community…Those who have experienced Friends’ concern for simplicity, equality, justice, and compassion in our educational institutions often have significant and positive influence in their wider communities.

Faith & Practice, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

The best, most appropriate worship for your class will come out of a planning process that is centered in the Spirit. If your goal is to make space to live out of the Spirit for the duration of worship, then creating that experience needs to come from the same place. Use all the additional resources you like, but start by stopping your thinking, fretting, wanting and planning. Take time to sit quietly, centering yourself. Use your heart to listen for guidance about what you should do to make a space for connection to the Divine in your classroom. Doing this work together with the Spirit has taught me more about what worship is than anything else in my life. Then, if you need to complement or support your leadings with resources, turn to:

  • Craft resources
  • Friends and co-workers
  • Faith & Play Stories
  • Books about worship, centering, meditation

For Elementary School Students

Children in elementary school often flow through life with a blended boundary between work, play, and spiritual life. While adults may may have segments between the different parts of a day, for many children, the important distinction is between meaningful engagement and boredom. Is the activity interesting? Is it fun? Do I have to sit still or hold my body a certain way? Can I use my outside voice? When adults worship with children, their task is to protect and nurture the child’s connection to God as they experience it. 

Introducing worship in a way that is meaningful, not boring, can be quite simple. You might include fidgets, such as pipe cleaners, that are silent and allow for a meditative space.

For Middle and High School Students

Older students may benefit from being in nature, starting with a check-in, or exploring images in books. For more information, see “Practices for Deepening Your Experience of Worship” on the Centering & Worship page.

When Friends worship, we reach out from the depths of our being to God, the giver of life and of the world around us. Our worship is the search for communion with God and the offering of ourselves – body and soul – for the doing of God’s will.

–Faith & Practice, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

Frequently Asked Questions

Does worship have to be silent and still?

  • No, it doesn’t! Sing! Make something! Dance, go for a walk, tell stories, play with clay, write a poem, play a game, draw, build, use your creativity!
  • Lead children in worship sharing. Set the tone by dimming the lights, lighting a candle, or making your voice soft. Share a reflective question and invite responses. Offer children a special rock or object to hold as they share in response to the question.
  • Parker Palmer writes: “One does not apply worship to life. You make it your practice until worship and life become one.” This describes children and worship beautifully. It is exactly what young children already do.  

When is a good time to have Meeting for Worship in the Classroom?

  • Every morning to start the day.
  • Every Monday to start the week.
  • When the class is struggling with something important or difficult.
  • When the sun comes out after days and days of rain or the temperature rises after a long cold winter.
  • On a child’s birthday.
  • On a child’s last day of school when they are transferring.
  • To focus before a test, a performance or an athletic event.
  • When kids are overwrought.
  • When you feel like it
  • When a child feels like it.

Where should we hold worship?

  • In your classroom
  • With another class in their room
  • In the Meetinghouse
  • In the Library
  • In the auditorium or gym
  • Outside in a field or a grotto or under a tree
  • In a Specials classroom
  • In a Garden or on a Walking Path

Change your space once in a while – new settings are inspiring! They are inspiring both for your planning ideas and for the kids’ experience.

How do I set the tone?

Make the space special, mark the time as something out of the ordinary. You can do this just by adding a little something that you don’t usually have in your room. Doing the same thing every time helps set this time apart as its own special event. For example:

  • Ask the children to be silent as they enter the room
  • Light a candle
  • Sing a particular song to start or finish
  • Put some seasonal flowers in a special vase
  • Try some incense
  • Ring a bell, tap some windchimes or play an instrument to start
  • Take your shoes off
  • Sit on the floor if you are usually in chairs or vice versa.

Some of these ideas may feel too church-y or too New Age-y for you. Don’t use those ideas. Find something that feels comfortable to you.

How long should we worship?

  • 30 seconds; 5 minutes; 30 minutes. It depends more on the age of your children and the context of the worship than an outside standard. Traditional silent worship will likely be shorter than worship through stories, discussion and art.
  • You may want to have an expectation of how long silent worship will be from the outset. On the other hand it can be powerful to simply worship as long as you are led to. Feel for the right moment to end it – not by how long the wiggliest child can stand it but by what seems right in the center of your self.
  • Allow one of the children to determine when to break worship by shaking the hand of her neighbor. Being the one to determine when is the right time to end worship makes one have to pay very close attention!

How to Talk About Centering

You may have had the experience of walking into a worship service, whether Quaker or not, and feeling deeply that there is something electric or binding moving through the room. When that happens, the worship pulls you right into the center of it, whether you know what you are doing or not. That is a very powerful way of learning through experience what worship is all about and how to do it. A classroom (or a meetinghouse) full of children can reach that powerful place, when the conditions are right.

The centering time needs to start from a spiritual space that is centered in the Divine, whether it’s a brief moment, a story, or a worshipful discussion. Provide a bit of a map to guide children. Your goal is to help them find a space that allows them to be open to the Spirit’s presence. That’s worth repeating: We need only to make the space in our lives to recognize or be open to the Spirit. Following are a few suggestions of landmarks for your map. Teaching landmarks to the children and starting with the same routine every time will help them learn how to use the time and eventually to sink naturally into worship as soon as they start to gather.

  • The first several times you worship with a class, be clear, in language meaningful to you, about what Meeting for Worship is about. Repeat this more often for younger children, and only once or twice for older children. For example: “We’re going to listen for God with our hearts” or “We’re going to let go of everyday thoughts and concentrate on what is most important deep inside of us.” You can also say: “We’re going to be still and feel the Love that is inside and all around each of us.”
  • Allow the children to recognize God and Love by their own understanding. By using words you may not use all the time (God, Love, the Divine), you set the experience apart. By using a variety of terms, you give children space to find the one that works for them.
  • If posture is important to you, then teach children about ways to sit. Many people choose to sit up, in a balanced way when they worship. Some people want to snuggle inward and wrap their arms around their body. Depending on your temperament and the group of youth you’re working with, you may have tighter or more relaxed boundaries.
  • Recommend that everyone starts with a deep breath. It is amazing how relaxing and cleansing and centering such a simple thing can be.  
  • If you’d like, draw attention to children’s hands. Often, when adults start talking about sitting straight and centering down, children start holding their hands in traditional Buddhist meditation positions and then they start giggling. You can ask them what they think about when they do that. You can also explain that serious meditators hold their hands in different ways because hands are powerful: when they put their thumb and forefinger together, it means something to them. Show the children how you hold your hands in a way that is meaningful to you.
  • Eyes open or closed? The older children are, the less they want to close their eyes. The benefit of closing one’s eyes is that one’s attention is not caught by every movement and every friend in sight, rather attention is drawn internally. An alternative is to look down at the floor a foot or so in front of one’s self.
  • Other landmarks you may want to teach kids include a brief physical relaxation exercise and visualizations. There are several books that give good suggestions for doing these kinds of activities with children.

Talking with Children about God

It is not unusual for teachers to hesitate to bring up issues of spirituality and divinity with students. Those who have had experience in public schools have learned that it is inappropriate to bring up such matters in the classroom. It is a personal subject and some prefer not to share deeply. On the other hand, many Friends schools have made a commitment to supporting the spiritual growth of children, typically both in their written statements and in their actions. For this reason, teachers are invited to explore ways to explicitly and implicitly bring the spiritual into the classroom.

  • That which is Divine has many names. Use the ones that are comfortable to you. That could be “God,” “Force of Unity,” “Love,” “Jesus,” “Spirit,” “Light,” “Nature,” or another term.
  • Encourage the children to use the names comfortable to them.
  • Briefly share your own beliefs. Sharing your faith teaches children that these conversations are acceptable and valued. Speaking briefly guards against their absorbing your beliefs as their own journey, without doing the spiritual work they need to do.  
  • If students are asking questions that feel too personal to you, don’t hesitate to tell them that your faith is personal and you choose not to share more than you already have. Allow them the same option.
  • Encourage them to speak with their family about what their family beliefs are. Make space for them to share with each other what their beliefs are.   
  • Some kids don’t believe in God. Their beliefs need to be welcomed as safely as every other religious belief the children bring into the classroom. This is one reason for using names for God that are less connected to religious traditions: Love, Wisdom, Truth (all names Quakers like to use!). It is not a reason to back off from the spiritual in the classroom.  

Everything’s Connected

Children are good at seeing unity. Allow them to be your teachers!

On a very long car ride across several states when my daughter was four, she announced “I’m God and you’re God and that tree is God, we’re all just different shapes.” And less than a minute later, with just as much gravity, she announced “Wouldn’t it be funny if walkie-talkies were phones that walked?” In her perception walkie-talkies, trees, her self and God are all of a piece.

-Christie Duncan-Tessmer

Letting Go of Control

Worship, whether during Meeting for Worship or in the midst of math class, is not something that can be directed. You can’t tell the children how to worship. You, the teacher, have enormous influence in how the environment is set up. This encourages worship, but then everyone needs to feel their way in by themselves. You make the space and let God do the rest.

Worship is when we live from the center of the Spirit, and it is time for everyone, not just the kids. In worship, teachers need to participate. But they need to participate as participants – not teachers! The kids are used to you being in charge. You tell them what needs to be done and where to go when during much of the day. It’s your job.  If you continue to be the teacher in worship, the kids will continue to be the students. Their own initiatives may be inhibited. Worship with the kids, not in front of them.

There is a balance between being the leader of the children and being the follower of your own leadings, intuition, path, God. You need to feel for that balance as you lead and as you follow.  

One does not apply worship to life.  You make it your practice until worship and life become one.

-Parker Palmer

Additional Resources

Print Resources

  • “Born Remembering,” by Elise Boulding. Pendle Hill Pamphlet #200
  • Answering That of God in Our Children, by Harriet Heath. Pendle Hill Pamphlet #315
  • “Education and the Inward Teacher,” by Paul Lacey. Pendle Hill Pamphlet # 278
  • Darian, Shea, Sanctuaries of Childhood: Nurturing a Child’s Spiritual Life, Gilead Press, 2001
  • Granahan, Louise Margaret, Children’s books that Nurture the Spirit. Northstone Publishing, 2004
  • Hendricks, Gay, The Centering Book: Awareness Activities for Children, Parents and Teachers. Prentice-Hall, 1976.
  • Hendricks, Gay, The Second Centering Book: Awareness Activities for Children, Parents and Teachers. Prentice-Hall, 1977.
  • MacLean, Kerry Lee, Peaceful Piggy Meditation. Albert Whitman & Company, 2004
  • Murdock, Maureen, Spinning Inward. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987. 
  • O’Reilley, Mary Rose, Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1998
  • O’Reilley, Mary Rose, The Peaceable Classroom. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1993
  • “Opening Doors to Quaker Worship,” by the Religious Education Committee of Friends General Conference, 1994.
  • Rozman, Deborah,  Meditating with Children. Boulder Creek, California: Planetary Publications, 1994.
  • Spirit Games, by Barbara Sher.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
  • Wolf, Aline, D. Nurturing the Spirit in non-sectarian classrooms. Parent Child Press, 1996

Last updated December 18, 2025.

✕
Translate »