Lesson 8 / Knowledge helps us contribute to the betterment of the world

Our current set of lessons is all about ‘knowledge’. To start out today’s session, we conducted a little ‘science’ experiment. See the video and pictures below!

Getting the paper lantern ready…

The lantern filling quickly with hot air…

The Magic Lantern Experiment from Leyla Neilsen on Vimeo.

…and it flies!!!

After lots of excitement about the lantern  (and speculations on its landing) and a promise, to do this again sometime – we continued with our lessons. To concluded our ‘knights of knowledge’ activities from the previous classes with a QUEST. Using this copymaster (God’s_Tokens_Quest), we used one set of the larger ‘tags’ and stuck them to the outside of paper cups, placing them around the room (sun, rain, sky, mountains, etc). Then each child cut out a set of the little tags with various ‘tokens’ of God, which we can find all around us in nature. Each child then went on a quest, walking around the room to place these tokens into the appropriate cups.

Once all tokens were placed, the children took turns in reading out what tokens can be found in nature – eg. Mountain: steadfast, grandeur, majesty, etc. Animals: kind, caring, companion, etc… it was a beautiful example to see how much nature can teach us about God.

Moving to Lesson 8, today’s aspect of knowledge was about ‘using knowledge for the betterment of the world’. We discussed how knowledge can help us learn things that we can then use to make our world a better place – eg. become a doctor, to help sick peeople, become a cook, to feed people, an architect to build safe houses to live in, a teacher to teach others, and many more ideas were shared!

Reading the wonderful story of Dr Susan Moody, who was a female doctor from Chicago in the early 1900s and agrees to move to Iran, to become a doctor for women and later opening a school for girls, was very inspiring and we used our drama time to enact her story. See the pictures below…

Well done everyone! We will practice our memorisation again next week – as we ran out of time today – but here it is if you have time before next week to practise it:

Exert every effort to acquire the various branches of knowledge and true understanding. Strain every nerve to achieve both material and spiritual accomplishments. -‘Abdu’l-Bahá