baha’i children’s class ideas.

learning concepts
“Allah’u'abhá” means “God is most glorious”. Bahá’ís use it as a way of greeting each other.
Greeting each other helps each of us feel welcome.

activities
Fruit Salad: Each child picks the name of a fruit, for example apple, orange, banana, etc. Call out two fruits; the children who picked those two fruits switch places. When you call “fruit salad”, everybody switches places.
All My Friends/The West Wind Blows: Similar to the Fruit Salad game, except callouts begin with “All my friends who are…” and then continue with some characteristic that several people share, for example, colour of clothes, first letter of name, eye or hair colour, birthplace, etc. Everyone who shares that characteristic then switches place with the others. Callouts may also begin with “The west wind blows on everyone who…” ALSO: Game-caller is in the middle of the circle and tries to find his place along with everyone else. The person who is left out of the circle then becomes the new game-caller. This variant works best with chairs, and is probably best played with older groups.
Jump-Up: Each child, in turn, jumps up, introduces themselves, and says something about themselves such as a favourite activity, etc. OR: instead of saying something about themselves, they could strike a pose and freeze; they could mime their favourite activity, etc.
Greet & Switch: A chosen child moves across the circle to face another child (preferably someone she doesn’t know very well) and says, “Hello (or Alláh-u-abhá), I’m (…), how are you? It’s good to meet you!” (S)he then takes the place of whoever (s)he was facing, who then takes his or her own turn.

reference
(none this time around – we need these!)

experience
October 14, 2006: ~2.5 hours, 7 children, ages ~6-10. A good class to start off our new year of classes. We had encouraging turnout: 5 of last year’s core group of children attended, plus two more. The class started out slowly as we waited for some of the children to arrive, so we played a number guessing game in the meantime. Maybe not the most original game, but the kids got into it. We started (late) with prayers; they were quite beautiful. About half the children were shy and didn’t want to say prayers; the others did. I noticed it was the usual ones who didn’t want to say prayers. Still struggling to find ways to open up the desire to pray in these kids. Afterwards, we started with one prayer (O God! Guide me…), discussed it and asked what the words meant. We worked on memorizing it, with several children leading in a repeat-after-me style. Once the memorization was done, we opened up with some get-to-know you games; we played a couple of versions of Jump-Up and Greet & Switch. One of the kids, as was his habit last year, became distracted during the games and began to disrupt the class. I think all of us lost some patience with him, which I personally regret. After the games, we took some time to work on our new prayer books – after that was all done, we had snacks and went outside to play more active games. All in all? As I said, not too bad, but we could have done better. We didn’t mention “Allah’u'abha” as a particular Baha’i greeting, which is an important oversight. I think we probably all got panicked because it had been a while since we had done the class, and we weren’t as prepared (spiritually? materially?) as we could have been. It was a nice little jolt starting the class again – stressful, but doable. I still feel very confident about this year’s class and know that, once we get back into the rhythm of the class, things should go just fine.