Lesson 17 : Pure, kind & radiant heart

This must be one of my favourite lessons 🙂 it is based on lesson 2 in Ruhi Book 3, and we’ve gone through it before. The children needed very little prompting to remember the quote for today’s lesson:

“O Son of Spirit! My first counsel is this: possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart.”

We changed the craft slightly too – painting beautiful hearts – pure, kind and radiant ones – but then stringing them up, instead of using them as magnets. We loved the way they look, when we wrote the words first with oil crayons, and then painted over with a water based paint – the brightly colourful results are gorgeous!

 (the lovely ‘heart-mobiles’ and their makers 🙂 )

For today’s story, we used an ‘old’ book I had from my parents, called ‘The Scottish Visitors’ – a story about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to London. It’s beautifully illustrated, and the story suits age groups from 5 to 12 alike!

We finished the class by playing the game ‘Burning thirst’ (Ruhi book 3, page 18). Sticks are tied to childrens’ arms – to prevent them bending their elbows – and they pretend to have walked in the desert and are very thirsty. A glass of water is given to them and they have to try and drink it (only works if they work together and hold it for each other). 🙂

And then sang Stefan Brown’s song on ‘kindness’. Always a favourite of everyone in class. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday everyone and see you next week, which will be the last class of this term (19th September).

Lesson 3 : Justice

Today we learnt about Justice. Using material from both Ruhi Children’s Class books (3 and 3a – see lesson pdf for download) – we started out with some drama exercises, which were lots of fun.

We then moved on to act out a story, about some villagers who have to harvest their fruit, because of an oncoming storm that might destroy the whole crop. At the same time there is a leak in the school house roof, that needs fixing, before all school materials get soaked. The villagers divide into two groups – some help with the harvest and some help with fixing the roof. When evening comes around and all are tired from the hard work – the big question arises – do the roof-fixer-upers get to have some fruit as well, even though they didn’t pick it…? The children were very quick in coming up with various just and fair solutions! Well done!!

See a pdf of the lesson 3_Justice here.

Our craft then centred around keeping the balance and the virtues we need to achieve justice – we made a mobile!

It took a bit longer to get all the colouring, glueing, cutting and attaching done, so we didn’t quite manage the planned game of fruitsalad as well – maybe next time…. 🙂

See you all next Sunday when we’ll learn about … ‘love’!