This video comes to us from a children’s class teacher training in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. Participants are practicing a non-competitive variation of the game Birds of a Feather (with various animals in place of birds). Very simply, the game proceeds like this: exchange slips of paper with animal names written on them at “go”. Read the paper at “stop”. Make your animal’s noise at “action” and try and flock together with others making the same noise.
The game’s original rules (given in the link above) describe a competitive version, in which the last team to “find their flock” is counted out, leaving winners and losers. We chose to eliminate this competitive element, to focus on the cooperative skills required in matching oneself up with one’s flock; instead of being counted out, we simply play the game as many times as we wish, with everyone participating. To keep the game interesting without resorting to competition, we can introduce different modes of play. For example, instead of using sounds, we can use nonverbal visual cues. Players might mime flapping wings for birds, or walking like a cat or a dog; or, conversely, they might mime taking care of one’s animal—calling to a bird on one’s finger, petting a cat or walking a dog, etc. Competition, which can lead the children to develop the undesirable habit of seeking conflict, is thus avoided by the application of creativity—finding different, innovative ways of keeping games interesting.
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.
