Hey there, sweet teacher friend! Welcome to a unique week on the blog. Whether you are religious or not, the positive thinking and affirmations that can be found within a prayer can be healing and powerful to our minds. We definitely need this kind of help, and we all know there are many times we could definitely say in the classroom, “I am living on a prayer right now!”
So how do we take this strange school year and end it confidently saying we have made our greatest impact and spread our joy as much as possible to our little learners? How do we utilize the time that we have left in the most effective way? A little prayer could never hurt at this moment, trust me!
So this is my end of the year primary teacher prayer. My hope is that it encourages and inspires you to end this year off right. To take the time that you have left and really put it to great purpose within the classroom.
No need to kneel on the floor or bow your head. Just read along and meditate with me. So, here is our end of the year teacher prayer.
End of the Year Prayer
Dear Lord, I come before You at this moment representing some of the most amazing career holders on the planet. Lord, You know that teachers have this incredible passion and love for children that the rest of the world needs to have.
You know how hard we work. You know how dedicated we are. And You also know how extremely tired we are at this moment in history after just teaching a full year in a pandemic. Wow, what a trip it has been, but we have been so blessed to see it through, to come here, and to say that we’re about to finish off a school year.
But with the end of a school year comes new stress and new worries about whether we’ve really done what we needed to do in the time we had. Virtual and hybrid learning have been a real beast in our lives and have really affected how we normally teach. So this year, for sure, we definitely need an extra pick me up, extra guidance, and extra support from You. So I come before You now asking for three things.
You provide so much, how horrible of me to ask for anything. But if granted, I believe Lord that we can finish off this year with our greatest impact on our little learners and go to summer break feeling at peace and feeling joy that we’ve done what we needed to do. So please hear me out, and consider blessing us with these three things.
Prayer for Focus
And to the very first gift, I pray that you give us deep in our souls the ability to focus. Give us the ability to focus for the remainder of our school year. There are so many things that distract us from our true purpose.
Help us keep our eyes on the prize: the incredible reward of being so impactful to a child that they will never forget us. The gift of being someone who has helped a child learn a skill that will follow them throughout their lives.
Help us to focus on those relationships that we are building, and the goals that we have for our little learners. Most of all, help us focus on forming memories. This is our very last opportunity to do just that. Those little souls look to us each and every day, and love us, and need our attention and our happiness and our smiles.
If we can focus on that, we can finish this year and have a great impact. Please Lord, give us focus.
Prayer for Passion
My second request is to please give us passion. Oh Lord, we’re all filled with it, but it’s hard to tap into that well when everything else is going on in our lives. But we began this career with passion. Passion for helping children. For being the leader of little people. For teaching children all those foundational skills they will need to have a great life.
We started here with passion, but it can so easily be hidden from us, Lord. Help us to unveil it once again. As we look toward our last few weeks of school, help us to remember our passion. Give us vivid memory of what brought us to this gig of helping children in the first place. Help that feed us energy to get us through.
I find such amazing and incredible energy from seeing those nonreaders become readers. And Lord, You know I have students struggling right at this moment to cross that threshold. But help me remember the feeling of that. Help me to get that adrenaline in my body that can help me keep going. I’ve got to get them there, Lord. I have to remember this passion.
For the amazing teacher that is reading right now, help them connect with their personal passions as well so that they can help their students reach those goals in time to say goodbye. I truly believe that each of us are placed on this planet with a purpose, and I pray that our passion leads to that purpose and helps us to fulfill it with what time we have left with this particular group of kids.
So Lord, along with our focus on what’s most important, also please, give us passion.
Prayer for Joy
And finally, my last request could be the most important of all. And that, Lord, is to give us joy to spread to our little ones. With time ticking away, as it always does, (by the way, could You slow that down for just a second?) our opportunities to make this joyful impression about learning and life with our students is almost gone. Unfortunately, many of the little ones that are in our care are facing a long, lonely summer, void of learning. And maybe void of happiness.
Lord, You know what my life has been. You know that I spent many summers wishing for school to be back in session. For many different eras in my life, school was a fortress from the things I wanted to hide from. I know that many, many children within our schools feel the same way.
But even if that’s not the case and they have a perfectly happy life, we want to end this year by placing a love and joy for learning within the hearts of every student that we serve. When students connect joy and learning together, their drive to continue learning will sustain. Anything that we connect the feeling of joy and happiness to is more likely to recur in our lives over and over and over.
Looking ahead, we teachers know we have very little opportunity left to spark that joy and love, so please give us extra joy in our hearts to share, to spread. Once sparked, it can definitely take hold and become a wildfire in the hearts of our students.
Help Us Share Joy
Guide our language, our actions, our decisions to represent joy in the classroom. Please help us manage our students with joy. Help us interact with their parents with joy. Help us teach with a level of excitement that makes every child realize that learning is a joyful experience. Growing and evolving and becoming more knowledgeable is one of the best experiences they can have. It can literally lead them down whatever path they dream of.
But it all begins with us, their teacher. The torch is in our hands, and we have to pass it on, so we need that joy. Help us search it out, find it, keep it burning for the rest of our time. There’s very little time left, but our little students deserve it. They were place with us for a reason, and undoubtedly within that purpose is for us to share our joy for learning. So Lord, along with focus on what’s most important, and along with passion, please give us joy to spread to our little learners.
We are already so abundantly blessed to be the leaders of the world’s future Lord, but I ask these things for myself and for each and every wonderful, amazing teacher reading, because we’re all just living on a prayer most of the time. But if we’re blessed with the three things I’ve asked You for today, I know that we can do this. I know that we can make it through with our greatest impact and be the incredible teacher each student deserves.
Thank You for each and every blessing You give us.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen
Finish the year with joy!
I hope that this prayer has helped you to meditate on some positive thoughts and helps you take some great actions to finish off this year with your best foot forward. We’re all tired and killed out from an extremely strange school year. But that does not mean we can’t end it on a high note and give our students what they need.
I believe in you teacher, and I hope this prayer has helped you today. If you really enjoyed today’s episode and your heart is just set on being a joyful teacher, I definitely recommend that you sign up for updates for my upcoming professional development called The Joyful Teacher Academy. This is a training and community of teachers just like you who want to be the teacher every child deserves.
I cannot wait for its release, because it’s all of the things I wish I had learned in college, but instead have had to learn the hard way over ten years of being a teacher. I can’t give you an exact release date, but I can tell you it will be soon, and if you sign up you will be the very first to get notified. There is already a list of incredible teachers waiting for that information, and I certainly would like to add you there as well.
If you could use some more encouragement right now, head over to this POST of reasons you should absolutely (not) quit teaching or this POST for all us tired teachers out there.
I hope you have an incredible rest of the school year, teacher. You are making a world of difference by being the world to your little learners. Don’t ever forget that!
As always, until we meet again, go make a difference, teacher friend!
XOXOXO
Toni
So beautiful. I really needed this. Thank you.