Grade 2: Lesson 6 – Thankfulness

Being thankful for whatever comes our way, is not always the easiest thing to do. Sure if it’s all fun and games, but what if it’s difficulties? Tests that teach us patience…? In today’s class we learnt, that being thankful brings peace to our souls. And Thanksgiving to God increases our capacity to receive His mercy and attracts greater and greater shares of His bounty.

To remind us of all the things we can be thankful for, we created some paper cornucopias and filled them with popsicle sticks, that contain our ‘thanks’…. our family, friends, a warm home, food, smiles, hugs – the children’s ideas of thankfulness seemed to have no limits 🙂 (Thanks to Chrissie for an awesome idea!)

Before the crafts, we reviewed the unity prayer, that we have been practicing over the last couple of lessons. The memorising is coming along nicely… we used a ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ today, to focus on some more of the words. It’s all in today’s lesson pdf – you can download it here.

The drama component had a fun exercise in it, to learn to follow instructions and trust each other’s ‘guidance’. It’s called bus, and the driver is at the back of the line, hands on the shoulders of the person in front. He’s the only one with his eyes open, the others follow his guidance – tap left or right shoulder, to move left or right; push forward gently, or pull back to make the bus move, or stop. It was quite challenging, even though our bus was quite short – we’d need more practice, especially with a much longer bus 🙂

And today’s story was one, that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá often told – About King Mahmud and his devoted servant Ayáz, and the melon, received thankfully, even though it was bitter (p.41 in Ruhi Book 3a).

Today was the last class for this term. Have a wonderful break! As of next term our new classes will be held in Masterton, where we offer 3 separate (age-group specific) classes, starting Sunday 7 August: 10am – 12noon. Not quite sure yet, how this blog will work/look then – but I’ll try my best and keep you all posted!

Lesson 11 : Kindness

Welcome back everyone! It’s been a fabulous first lesson after the school holidays 🙂

We talked about kindness, and what it means to be kind to each other, to animals, the planet, ourselves – to EVERYONE… Memorising the quote for today’s lesson was a breeze. Our children are learning them so quickly, it’s becoming second nature. Well done everyone!

After singing Stefan Brown’s song ‘Kindness‘, we made some peaceful and happy kindness-birds. A fabulous craft idea from the Australian Peace Pack material. It’s the little kindnesses we show each other that give us wings and lift our hearts and spirits!

It was great to see all the beautiful birds take flight…

We finished the class with the ‘Hidden Virtue’ game. Have a look at the lesson pdf for a description of how it is played – we had good fun with it and did at least 4 rounds 😉

Thanks all for  great class and see you next Sunday – when we’ll learn about Generosity (some cookie baking/decorating might be involved….) – yum!