Lesson 10 – part 2: the importance of living in unity

After lots of singing – thank you Stefan, John and Lily! – we started as usual with our karakia (prayers) and morning tea (thank you Scott!). A quick recap of the last lesson helped everyone remember what we did: the big prayer mural, the ‘fighting fingers’ and the quote we memorised: “So powerful is the light of unity that in can illuminate the whole earth.”

Today we then shared the other elements of lesson 10 – a story about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and how he brings two people back together, after they hadn’t spoken to each other because of a disagreement. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá resolves the matter by telling them funny stories when they both happen to be at his house, and He gave them each a present to remember them as token of their friendship. The two gentlemen laughed at the stories and were able to look past their differences, celebrating in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s joyous presence.

We then discussed what other things we can do to make people feel like their united and living happily. To come up with some actual ‘acts of service’ that we can render to our families, we used the ‘Service Token Booklets’ from the Australian Peace Pack. See pic to the side>> 

To finish off today’s lesson, we did the various warm up exercises in the drama section. Standing out imaginary squares, stretching and bending, pretending to wash dishes, feed chickens, dig a well, etc etc. And then played a really fun game – we called it ‘Pass the face’.

Everyone sits in a large circle, one person makes a funny face and each person in turn, passes it along the circle. We had some great laughs! 🙂

To remind us of the prayer we are in the process of memorising, everyone got to take a copy of the beautiful cover from a Brilliant Star Magazine home – illustrating the theme ‘We are all the Waves of One Sea’.

Hope you’re all having fun with your service token booklets – we look forward to hearing your stories next time!

Lesson 1 : unity in diversity

What a beautiful first class, thanks everyone! We started out with lesson 1 (from the Ruhi Curriculum) which is all about UNITY. After some fun introductions – where the children said their name and an animal, that starts with the same first letter, as well as making that animal’s noise – we shared a prayer for children, by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

Today’s story was called ‘The Secret in the the Garden‘, by Winifred Barnum, in which an old lady tries to teach the villagers to live in harmony, just like the beautiful flowers in her garden. At first only a very clever little girl really understands her and then helps the others in the village to learn about the beauty of unity in diversity.

We didn’t quite have time to memorise the quote for today – but created some sparkly candle holders to remind us of it. They are made of little glass jars, that we glued over with torn, colourful paper-bits and then we simply stuck a tealight inside them.

So powerful is the light of unity that it can illumine the whole earth.

Well done all – they look gorgeous! 😉 I can’t wait for tonight, when we can light them and enjoy the colourful light that will glow from them! See you next week, where we will learn about the importance of having a pure, kindly and radiant heart…

Have a look at a pdf of the complete lesson here, or check out the ‘lesson page‘ for more 🙂

Lesson 16 : Unity

Happy Fathersday..! We had a small class today, no doubt, children were at home celebrating their dads 🙂

We looked at the virtue of unity in today’s class. The quote, which we learned in lesson 1 already, was quickly memorised or remembered. And we moved straight to some songs – ‘unity’ by Stefan Brown, and ‘Ye are drops’ from Ruhi Book 3.

We made some unity candle holders – a triangle made up of linked people, which the children decorated beauitfully, set on a base, with a candle in the middle – they look really cool – well done!

After the crafts we played  a game called ‘giants’. Where two children are tied together by their leg, and have to work together to walk. Making it more difficult with obstacles they have to manage, or funny walks – frog leaps, duck waddles, etc. – we had some very talented giants, doing great team work!

We finished our lesson today with a story about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the charcoal – p 15. Ruhi Book 3. Check out the Lessons Page  for more info. As we are now repeating the 15 previous lessons, I won’t post them in every report again. Only the bits we did different or that are new the lesson done previously.

If you are using any of these lessons, leave a comment let me know how they work for you – it be great to hear what others do in their classes and ways to continually improve them 🙂

Til’ next week! 😉

Lesson 1 : Unity

The theme of the first lesson today was… UNITY! I will try and make sure I post details about the lesson after each class, for those who missed it to see what we did, and for others to use as resource material in their own classes. If you have suggestions for improvements, comments or your own experience you’d like to share, leave us a comment!

1_Unity (pdf of lesson, including colouring in page)

We even had muffins for the first class today, enrollment forms and all was set 🙂

The unity candle holders and ‘unity in diversity’ people chains we made today:

Busy craft bees:

The book we used for the story

It was a great first class – the community centre is such a gorgeous place to have them and we look forward to many more! ’til next week 🙂