“To give and be generous are attributes of Mine…”

While today’s lesson was about generosity, Aunty Ngaro and Lily shared with us how to make pois! Aunty Ngaro had most generously braided a whole lot of ‘handles’ for us to then use and attach the ‘ball’-part. They look absolutely beautiful and will come in very handy, for practicing our songs!

While the two older classes learnt and practiced how to use the pois (it’s quite tricky really!) the youngest class learnt about sharing…

All in all it was a busy morning – with 5 new children joining today, which brings our roll up to just over 30 – wow! We need to get moving and train more teachers soon! (Let us know if you’d like to help!)

There are 3 more classes before we break for the school holidays – don’t miss out – see you next week! 🙂

Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues…

Before we started our lessons today, the older children (6 to 11 year olds) worked on an ‘ideal class room’ project first. An exercise we borrowed from the Junior Youth Programme. The children were asked to think about the question “How would people act or interact in an ideal classroom?” and discuss it in smaller groups. Afterwards they all presented their ideas in the group assembly and we wrote them down on the white board.  Together we then decided which ones would be our 5 main ones – that we would set ourselves as our class rules – this is what the children came up with – awesome work!:

1. Sharing / be generous
2. Be respectful / no swearing
3. Be patient / take turns
4. Listen / obey your teachers
5. Don’t fight or backstab

We then split into our age groups for the lesson on ‘truthfulness’. The memorisation was short and the children picked it up real quick: “Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues.”

As a practical application of the quote, we tried to build a human pyramid, to experience, how important it is to have a strong foundation (those people on the bottom had to be very strong to carry all the others on top 🙂 …)

Another example of how important it is to tell the truth, was in today’s story – about the Boy who cried wolf: After all his practical jokes he played on the villagers, no-one believed him, when he called for help when a wolf really did come and attack his sheep.

After colouring in, we then closed our classes today with songs and prayers.

Remember that we’re making poi next Sunday (Aunty Ngaro is teaching us), so we can start using them in our songs – if you can, please bring some wool and plastic bags – thank you!