activities
story: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. There is an excellent retelling in Book 2 of Bahá’í Education for Children, aka the Furútan curriculum. Our children could relate to it a lot.
song: “Tell the Truth” or “Truthfulness”, from Ruhi Book 3.
craft: Nine-pointed stars—cut out three equilateral triangles for each child; help them put them together to form a regular nine-pointed star. They may either (1) place them on another piece of paper, trace them, and cut out the resulting nine-pointed star, or (2) glue the three triangles together to form a nine-pointed star. They can then decorate the star as they wish; they may also want to punch a hole in one point and run a string through to hang it somewhere when finished.

reading/prayer for study
Let truthfulness and courtesy be your adorning. (Bahá’u'lláh)

Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues. (‘Abdu’l-Bahá)

reference
O SON OF MAN! Neglect not My commandments if thou lovest My beauty, and forget not My counsels if thou wouldst attain My good pleasure. (Bahá’u'lláh, Arabic Hidden Word no.39)

experience
December 2, 2006: 2 hours, 10 children, average age 6-7. Pretty good class this afternoon; our only hang-up, lesson-wise, was that I didn’t prepare the craft in time, and we ended up cutting out the triangles at the last minute. Miraculously, the kids didn’t implode out of impatience. I was surprised to find such an amazing retelling of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, too. The kids weren’t looking forward to the story too much today—too much sitting quietly, I guess—but all of them got into it and could empathize with the main character. The story focused on the consequences of the boy’s actions (which were mainly along the lines of disappointing his family and his community and losing their trust) and wasn’t cheesy at all. I was afraid that telling that story would elicit groans from the kids—everyone’s heard that story way too many times, right? I was happily mistaken.

A quick word about our renewed focus on discipline: we have been taking certain steps to quiet the children down at the beginning of the class, and it seems to be paying off. While the children aren’t necessarily at their best every moment of each class, the class seems to be more manageable now. We haven’t yet had the need to apply a punishment (what Ruhi Book 3 refers to as “sanctions”—in our case, sitting apart from the class during the colouring period that now follows prayers); God willing, we won’t have to, but in the meantime all of us (the co-teachers) have to be ready to do so if disruptive behaviour arises.

August 17, 2007: 1 hours, 3 children, average age 7-8. Our calmest outreach class so far! Due to rain, we had to move the classes inside for the evening, at the home of a Baha’i who recently moved into the area. (more in a bit.)

December 5, 2007: 1 hour, 3 children, average age 8. Outreach class. wow. pretty interesting class. discipline went well even though we had some normally feisty kids in the class – things have gone better since we introduced the painting activity, which has given our more tactile/kinesthetic learners a stronger reason to engage themselves in the class. after reading prayers and singing two songs (“Tell the Truth” and “Blessed is the Spot”), we memorized the quotation (“Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues”), which brought us into a discussion about what a “foundation” means. I think we got the idea across well enough—we introduced the idea of the foundation of a house, and how a house would fall over if it didn’t have a good enough foundation; we then compared our souls to those houses, and explained that without truthfulness, our “soul houses” (as it were) would have nothing to stand on, just like a real house. We then launched into the story—which I hammed up a great deal, but which again seemed to have gotten the point across—and, to end off the class, we had about five or ten minutes to paint with the kids. usually we have more time to paint, but I guess I hammed up the story a little too much!

One of the children told me something interesting that made me think; I’ll share with you an abridged version. She said she had gotten into the habit of lying about little things, for example, making a mess in the house—and then blaming said mess on one of her younger sisters out of the fear of punishment. When guilt finally overtook her later on, she would confess the truth to her parents, at which point she would be punished—perhaps worse than if she had told the truth in the first place. We encouraged her to see that as a good reason to tell the truth up front, but instead she cited the inevitable punishments as being “why I don’t tell the truth anymore”. yikes. How do you go about helping a child to learn to love telling the truth when they come out with something like that? (comments welcome…)

July 3, 2010: Trying it yet again! Outreach again this time. A group of us have been doing outreach in Chinatown and met some families all living in one apartment building who showed interest in a children’s class. After meeting a few times and sharing Anna’s presentation with the families (through a significant language barrier), we finally had a class of sorts, with 4-6 boys (I’d say about 5-8 years old). We played a lot more games than usual for us, and they loved it. in fact the class was mostly games, proportion-wise. all the same, we worked on memorizing “O God, guide me” and the quote on truthfulness. The prayers were amazing, as the older children stayed in quiet meditation for a full minute after the prayers were done–I’ve never seen that in all my time doing children’s classes. My co-teacher suggested it might have been due to their Buddhist background… in any case, it was astounding and MOST welcome, and we’ll encourage them to continue doing this for sure. They loved the story about the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and they seemed to grasp all the concepts well. overall, a great summer class after a very uneventful spring season.

I’m back from Vietnam, newly married, and diving back into the fray of life in my home cluster—back to the Chinatown children’s class I’ve been writing about for the past few months (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…) and dealing with new challenges. Oddly enough, at our local reflection meeting, someone told a story of an individual initiative that echoed exactly what’s been happening with our class. He explained how he and his wife had reached out to their neighbours, gathering up about five families who agreed to support a children’s class in their home. “It started out well,” he explained, “but as time went on, fewer and fewer people came.” Week after week, he contacted each family, and, from one week to the next, they would give some sort of reason why they couldn’t come—too tired, too cold, late lunch, family visit, whatever. It got to the point where he was wondering whether it was worth it to continue holding the class each week; why bother holding the class if there’s only one child?

Our team has been dealing with this same issue in the past month—or so I’m told, since I’ve been away—it seems like family after family has been dropping out of their commitment to the class. It’s not like we’re going to give up, of course. I’ve been teaching children’s classes long enough to see the same kind of thing happen, and I’m determined to learn how to get past it. Still, it’s a real poser. When I first got back, we consulted and decided we had to find out why the families in question had dropped out. We investigated, and found that part of the answer might have been lack of interest in the class. The parents had never really insisted that their children come—they just left it up to the children, saying, “If they want to go, we’ll take them”. Apparently the children just didn’t want to come anymore. That sent the gears in our heads turning, thinking, how can we make the class more attractive to the children?

We identified a few strategies: first was to find better activities, and a more engaging format. We use a calendar to plan our classes (see above), so we added columns for each type of activity so we could plan several weeks in advance which craft, story, game, etc., we would feature for each class. That way, we would be better prepared for each class, and could incorporate more complex and engaging activities, ones that require more preparation than the ones listed in Ruhi Book 3. We had already decided beforehand to repeat each lesson two weeks in a row, and to use different activities each week to avoid too much repetition. We decided to increase the length of the classes from 1.5 hours to 2 hours, with a snack break in between (everyone loves snacks), splitting the class time into two portions. The first portion would be dedicated to the lesson: a few minutes of “presenting” the lesson, time to memorize a quote, and selected activities. The second portion would be devoted to arts and crafts, so that children could go home having accomplished something creative, yet still related to the lesson. Children who finish the craft quickly would be given a drawing or colouring exercise (dependent on age); drawing exercises (click for an example) would include some writing work as well.

This is a current issue for us, and in the next few months we’ll be focusing on class quality and outreach to gather more families into our community of interest. What a joy it is to make a commitment to learning about the core activities—there’s certainly not a boring moment.

activities
story: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the unkind man, Ruhi Book 3, pp.45-46. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá shows love to a man who reviles and curses him for twenty-four years.
handprint flowers: trace your hand and turn it into a flower! a lily, to be precise.
rose tag: played much like freeze tag, except that when a player is tagged, he/she must sit down; a player must untag them by kneeling, touching the ground and saying (planting) “the rose of love”. helps the related quote (see below) to sink in.

reading/prayer for study
In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love.

reference
O FRIEND! In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love, and from the nightingale of affection and desire loosen not thy hold. Treasure the companionship of the righteous and eschew all fellowship with the ungodly.
(Hidden Words of Bahá’u'lláh, Arabic, No.3)

experience
May 13, 2006: ~1.5 hours, 2 children, average age 6. Mother’s day. The class started late, but we managed to hit on most of the main activities. We practiced and sang prayers with our two participants: “Blessed is the Spot” and “Say God Sufficeth”. We read the story of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the unkind man and had a good conversation about love and gratitude, which segued very well into the handprint flowers – the children’s Mother’s Day gift. Gotta go – more soon.

August 15, 2007: ~1 hour, 3 children, average age 8. Outreach class. We began with a new format for this class, to accommodate our group’s high energy level: colouring first to calm the kids down. So far, it seems to work like a charm – it may take a few minutes to convince some of them to colour instead of playing games, but once they’re convinced, they’ll be able to concentrate enough to say prayers together. We also created a new movement-based game for this lesson, called “rose tag”; it’s explained above.