Walking With God - The Young Person's Prayer Diary by Michelle Drake

Walking With God - The Young Person's Prayer Diary by Michelle Drake (YWAM Publishing)

This book encourages your child to write down their personal prayers and journal entries, as well as to learn and pray about places they might not have heard of.

Each month starts with a blank calendar page to fill in dates and special events. The next page focuses on a specific country, teaching your child about problems those people face and suggesting things to pray about. The page after that has a map to show where that country is and help your child relate better to what they've read. Focus countries include Haiti, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and nine more.

After the focus page and map, there are 13 journal pages for that month. Each journal page is divided with a left margin for the date and several lines for the daily journal. This way if your child just writes one sentence one day, but seven or eight the next day, it'll still work out. The idea here isn't to fill the pages with meaningless words, but to be thoughtful and write prayers, thoughts, or happenings that you can reflect back on later. The lines are not very long, but there are enough between the 13 pages that your child can write an average of 9 lines per day and still have plenty of space for that month. Some of the journal pages have a Bible verse at the top of them, and these vary throughout the book.

At the end of the 12 month's worth of journal pages, there are 2 Bible reading tracks that can be marked off as each chapter is read, and three pages to fill out as a small address book of friends.

Another thing worth noting is that while I got these for older kids (10-12), they would work well for younger kids who could simply write larger and take up two lines instead of one. Then the focus would be more on writing a date and key words rather than full sentences, but it would be a good beginning toward journaling habits and skills for when they get older. And the focus pages on countries would be a good "together" discussion for some parent/child time and reflection.