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!

Lesson 21 : Truthfulness

Kia ora – what a beautiful day it turned out to be! We had a fabulous lesson today – learning all about truthfulness. Being truthful is not always easy, we found out, but then telling lies never feels right either! Sometimes just exaggerating a story we tell about something we did, is moving away from being truthful. There’s no harm in it, if we say that it’s just a (made-up) story, but not if we pretend it was true. Investigating the truth for ourselves is another important aspect of practicing to be truthful – don’t just believe everything other people tell you…

Bahá’u’lláh said: “Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues.” The children learned this quote very quickly with some vigorous drumming, to get the rhythm right – well done!!!

The story of The Berenstain Bears and the truth – was the perfect illustration of today’s theme. It’s a great story, liked by younger and older audiences alike. And as one of our students in today’s class pointed out, there is a really lovely quote in the front of the book:

In the book, Brother and Sister Bear made up a fantastical story of a bird, that supposedly had flown into the treehouse and knocked down Mother Bear’s favourite lamp… the bird took on all sorts of different shapes, colours and features, with every retelling of the untrue story. In the end they learn that there is nothing finer than telling the truth – because trust, if broken, cannot be mended, whereas a lamp can always be glued back together :)!

Our birds were colourful and brightly fantastical as well – but we made them out of paper, and didn’t use them as a scapegoat…

And because it was such a sunny day – we took our birds outside to fly about and rest in a tree…

Thanks to all the wonderful children, for being such lovely students today – and see you next week. Or if you can all make it:

Join us for the Holy Day Celebration on Friday 12 November – for the Birth of Bahá’u’lláh! We’ll celebrate at the Featherston Community centre, starting 5.30pm with devotions, music, and stories and then have a shared pot-luck dinner. Look forward to seeing you all there!

For references to today’s lesson – check out the lesson page (lesson 6 on truthfulness, and lesson 12 on kindness for the bird templates)

Lesson 6 : Truthfulness

…Wolf! Wolf! The shepherd boy called….

We used the ‘Boy who cried Wolf’ story to learn about truthfulness today. It’s part of the Ruhi Curriculum and we had great drama interpretations of it. Well done everyone!

Our craft was a fun one too – making string phones! Conveying messages ‘truthfully’ listening to what the person on the other end said. Some very fancy string phones were produced:

…and well tested too…

It worked really well, as long as we remembered to keep the strings nice and tight 🙂

We finished by colouring in the sheet with the prayer we learnt/practiced singing today.

Another successful class today – we stayed warm in the artroom – thank goodness for little heaters – and hopefully no-one got too wet on the way home again!

Have a look at today’s lesson here 6_Truthfulness