baha’i children’s class ideas.

So far during the month of January, our Chinatown class has gone through four lessons on the themes of truthfulness, steadfastness, humility, and preferring others before oneself. We started off at the beginning of January (the 2nd) with a special three-hour class, which we hoped would be attended by a large number of families so that we could start off with a bang—of course, things don’t always go the way we would hope. Class size has fluctuated between three to five children each week, and due to how busy some of the families are, we’ve also run into some punctuality problems. So far, though, we’ve managed to get most of the children to memorize at least one prayer—”O God, Guide Me”—and are working on having them memorize the second one suggested in Book 3—the one that goes “I am earthly, make me heavenly”. We got together as a teaching team and discussed curriculum; the plan is to finish the lessons from Book 3, and then continue by introducing the lessons of the Furutan curriculum, given in the books Baha’i Education for Children.

The three-hour class went remarkably well; I haven’t tried to go that long with a class in a while, and was pleasantly refreshed to see that we had enough material to keep the children engaged, having fun and learning through the whole time. After praying and singing a few of our favourite songs, we plunged straight into memorizing the well-known Baha’i quote, “Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues”. We tried explaining it in terms of the foundation of a building; I’m not sure whether the analogy helped them or confused them. I keep wondering about how good their command of English is, since most of them have only lived in Canada for a year, and I seem to end up explaining a lot of the words. Perhaps that’s actually normal for kids of their age (~6-7 years), and I’ve been coddled by only having gifted children to teach in the past. Well, whatever. This makes for great teaching experience.  The second half of the class, after a healthy snack, consisted of putting together a house out of wooden stir-sticks—illustrating how virtues can be a “foundation” for human spiritual life—and a dramatic presentation of the day’s story, which was a retelling of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. It was actually my first time successfully “doing” drama with the kids in a children’s class; we did it by eschewing a script and instead giving the children their roles and lines verbally, with extensive narration by one of the teachers. We had two children playing the mother and father, and one playing the titular character. The children took their cues from the narrator, acting out whatever the story said. The whole thing worked out well, I had my directorial debut, and they got a real kick from acting out the story.

The next two classes dealt with slightly more abstract themes, and I noticed that we had a tougher time getting the message across to all of the kids. During both the lesson on steadfastness and the lesson on humility, they seemed to have trouble understanding the theme, and I had to explain it a few times, leaving me wondering what they had come away with. I found that the description of Book 3 seemed to go a little over their heads, so I tried to explain humility to the children the following way: God is big and powerful, and we, on the other hand, are so small and weak by comparison. Humility is just remembering how big and powerful God is, and how small and weak we are. When we remember that we depend on God for everything, we stop thinking that we’re better than anyone else around us. It took us most of the class time to get to that point of understanding, though. I think we got it by the end, but of course, as suggested in Book 3 itself, we’ll have to repeat it later on to be sure.

Regarding steadfastness, I was pleased to see that nobody came away with nightmares from the story of Ruhu’llah and his father, which I decided to tell in its entirety, though as non-graphically as I could. I’ve heard Baha’is express misgivings about telling a story in which the main character, a young boy dedicated to teaching and spreading God’s message, watches his father die before him only to die himself after refusing to recant his faith—but, besides having to make certain disclaimers, I’ve never heard either parents or children object to the story. On one occasion, a child reacted with anxiety to think that children could be killed in such a way, at which point the parent on hand explained that, while such things may have happened in that place at that time (19th-century Persia), we don’t have to worry about it happening to us here in Canada, which seemed to bring the anxiety level down. I made sure to give the same disclaimer this time, and nobody even made a peep—which, again, made me wonder whether they had understood what I was saying… oh well.

Several members of our teaching team just spent part of the afternoon on the ice at Ottawa’s Dow’s Lake, where many people, both locals and visitors from far and near, spend the winter months skating around on the world’s longest skating rink. no skates for us, though—we were accompanying two families from our Chinatown children’s classes who had never been out on the ice before. boots for all, and at least one young child snoozing comfortably in a stroller. the kids were full of energy, and dashed up and down the frozen surface of the lake at least twice, hooting and hollering, falling over and getting back up again, bumping into each other and flourishing into big hold-on-for-dear-life hugs. despite the chaos of little feet scrambling around on the ice, we managed to reinforce some of the lessons from the children’s class, such as showing kindness by helping our siblings and friends up when they fall. one of the children, a six-year-old girl, was asking lots of questions about all the big buildings she saw around us, which i attempted to answer, explaining the long words in their names. Perhaps thinking of other big complicated words, she asked me, “What about that ‘Thou art’… you know?” “You mean, ‘Thou art the Mighty and the Powerful’?” I replied, citing the prayer we had been memorizing together. “Yeah, that one. How does it go again?” she advanced. I repeated the prayer for her (making sure to be reverent and respectful), and she repeated it afterwards. We talked about what “mighty” and “powerful” meant, and discussed what it means that God is Almighty and All-powerful.  Really nice. I felt like it was a great bonding experience between us and the families; sort of like friends getting to know each other better. We walked them home feeling lots of joy at being together, knowing that we would meet again soon for another class.

Allah’u'abha friends,

Allah’u'abha friends,

Everyone was on time again. Today we had two children present. … joined us for part of the class, and spent some time talking to one of the Vietnamese friends who dropped by to do some photocopying.

Class began with prayers as usual; the children are calm and respectful during this time. We continued by memorizing the French version of "O God Guide Me" (even though I got the tune wrong this time); both children seem to know it very well now, and one said he had been practicing it at home. We continued on with memorization, again using the laptop for visual aids; we explained justice (the theme of the lesson) so that both children had a basic understanding of it, giving plenty of examples of both justice and injustice. The story of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá taking the less expensive coach helped to cement this concept in their minds. We then took a short break for stretches and a game, and returned to the table to finish the drawings we began last time and begin new ones. I was able to print out handouts with the quote, the song and another picture for the parents to take home, so that they would have a way to practice their lessons during the week. We walked home with one of the parents after class; she invited us in, but we politely declined this time, assuring her that we would come another time. Personally, I felt we shouldn’t necessarily impose and that she might have felt obligated—but any thoughts from others on this? Should we have jumped at the chance anyway? [Note that other members of our teaching team have also been having home visits with the parents.]

My co-teacher and I went for tea afterwards and discussed how we wanted to divide the tasks in the class, and shared some teachers’ resources. We also discussed a few other things, including the idea (which I wrote about in last week’s report) of bringing some of our new contacts into an English Corner run by local Bahá’ís. … had also suggested that we may want to change the class time, perhaps to Friday afternoon or evening, to better accomodate the director’s availability, seeing as he’s had to bail us out all the way from … more than once. He assured us that it was no problem at all though, and, besides that, the parents indicated that the weekend timing was better for them as well, and that Friday afternoon would be problematic.

All in all, a good class; each week we find ourselves more prepared, more organized and more ready to deal with whatever comes. Thank you to everyone for being part of this amazing team.

Love
Dan 

The children’s class started at 3:00pm, to give the leftover crowd time to finish their conversations and return home. We managed to make copies of the colouring pages earlier, using the Centre’s photocopier, and everything else was pretty much taken care of. After a few prayers by the parents (awesome!), we started by singing not one but two songs—"O God Guide Me" in French, and "His First Counsel Is This", the song that goes with that particular lesson. Having practiced both songs, we presented the lesson (pure, kindly and radiant hearts) and worked on memorizing the quote of the week, and I put the words on my laptop as a memorization aid. We spent a little more time on memorization since … related to me that one of the mothers was hoping there would be more of it, for their child to practice with (she confirmed this at the end of the class).

Allah’u'abha

Allah’u'abha friends

hi all,

if you so happen to be subscribed to doberman pizza, my personal baha’i blog, you probably know that I’ve been busy over the past few months planning a voyage to Vietnam. I just so happen to be blogging from a Hanoi café (wireless internet café) at this very moment. With my usual children’s class safely in the hands of Baha’i friends back in Ottawa, I’ve turned my attention to such exotic projects as developing a national Baha’i website in Vietnamese for the community here. as well, seeing as I have a fair bit of experience holding children’s classes, I’ve been asked to put together a skills training workshop for prospective teachers of children’s classes, to be held in Ho Chi Minh City in July. A number of youth have eagerly signed up for the training, which will happen as part of a week-long intensive training session aimed at mobilizing Vietnamese youth into service, especially to support the growing intensive program of growth (IPG) in Ho Chi Minh City (previously known as Saigon) and two burgeoning IPGs in Da Nang and Hanoi, both to be launched soon.  I imagine that if the training session in HCMC is successful, it’ll be replicated in the other two places.

I’ll probably blog more about what the training workshop will look like, but just to give you a quick idea, I’m planning four days’ worth of sessions, with each day focusing on a particular aspect of children’s classes: arts and crafts, songs and memorization, storytelling, and games/drama. Each day will consist of an introduction / theoretical portion in the morning, followed by practical advice on how to plan for the day’s activity, and, after a lunch break, an afternoon of group work and presentations in which participants practice planning the different activities: telling stories, memorizing songs, and so on.

Has anyone had experience offering these kinds of workshops or training sessions? How about Book 3 refreshers in which lesson planning played a part? I’d love to hear from Baha’is who have tried this out before.

many thanks to those of you who’ve left comments in the past few weeks and months with so many encouraging words. it really makes a difference! just about to head off to bed right now, with a children’s class tomorrow morning, about how "God knows the secrets of our hearts". I’ll have to blog this lesson since I don’t think I’ve added it yet. We were slated to do that one on the first weekend of January, but nobody showed up that week. the next weekend (last weekend), everyone was off to Toronto for the regional conference (which was amazing). So the lesson’s left over for this week.  Later in the day, I’ll be helping run the children’s program for our local reflection meeting. I have an idea of what I’m going to do for that one; since our city’s World Religion Day celebration is the next day, we’ll be doing a related art project from our oneness of religion lesson to decorate the Baha’i Centre. busy day huh? I’ll let you all know how it goes.