Lesson 19 : Consultation

Take ye counsel together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp of guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of understanding. –Bahá’u’lláh

We are now starting set 7 of the Grade 2 lessons – last set before Grade 3 – wohoo! 🙂 These next 3 lessons are all about ‘consultation’ and how consultation leads to greater understanding. When we consult, we come together in search of truth, discussing possibilities, talking over ideas and sharing understanding. All the participants contribute in whatever way they can so that a unified vision of the way forward can emerge.

We brainstormed some ideas on when we can use the gift of consultation – at school when deciding what game to play during lunch break; at home, when deciding what movie to watch for family movie night; when having to decide on what options to take at school; when planning a family trip; when buying a birthday present for someone; etc etc. we can consult on amy matter big or small!

We used the drama exercise for this lesson, which was great fun! The king of a large kingdom comes to visit a small village. He arrives at night on a large animal nobody had heard of before – an ‘elephant’. As he camps on the outskirts of the village for the night, the villagers send out some youth to go and find out what this ‘elephant’ looks like. It is pitchdark and each youth takes a turn to ‘see/feel’ the elephant. Each comes back with different reports – it’s like a snake at the front, long, thick and bendy; it’s like a tree-trunk that moves; it;s like a wall with rough skin on it; it’s smooth and pointy at the end; it’s like a rope….  such differing impressions make it hard for the youth to explain the elephant. On consulting together they realise they have simply ‘seen’ the elephant from different sides and if they put them all together they can make out a perfect image of the elephant! yay 🙂

To finish off our class for today, we started making pompom bookmarks – see this fabulous tutorial for instructions.

And while we had our class – the youngest participants had a puppet show – I didn’t get a chance to ask them what the story was about, but see the pics for now 🙂

Lesson 6 : Truthfulness

A big huge thank you to Liz Arrambide for posting the great idea of a puppet show for this lesson on ‘truthfulness’ on the http://www.ruhiresources.org website! We had so much fun with it. 🙂

It is based on the lesson’s quote “Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues”. One of the 2 characters is building a sculpture, out of ‘virtue-blocks’, because she is tired of people not telling the truth. A friend walks past and after finding out what she is doing, questions whether truthfulness is the best virtue to be the foundation of the house-like sculpture. He tries out a few others, but non of them seem to give the same stability to the sculpture.

They both end up building the sculpture together and the friend is convinced, while we need all those other virtues too – truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues.

My wonderful assistant helped me prepare the puppet show to perform for the children – and then we all made puppets, out of simple cardboard rolls.

We even had some impromptu puppetshows at the end of class… 🙂