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
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!
We had our first childrens’ class today, after the school holidays. Welcome back everyone! After some beautiful prayers read by all children and some pretty impressive poi-action, waiata, and morning tea, the older class launched into Set 4 of Grade 2.
This set of lessons (3) is all about living in Harmony. And the first one, about the importance of unity. As with the previous 3 sets, we started learning a new prayer. To help us do so, we created a ‘mural’ containing all the imagery of the beautiful language used.
This is the complete prayer:
O Lord God!
Make us as waves of the sea, as flowers of the garden, united, agreed through the bounties of Thy love. O Lord! Dilate the breasts through the signs of Thy oneness, and make all mankind as stars shining from the same height of glory, as perfect fruits growing upon Thy tree of life.
Verily, Thou art the Almighty, the Self-Subsistent, the Giver, the Forgiving, the Pardoner, the Omniscient, the One Creator.
We then looked at one part of the drama activity for this lesson – the story of a hand, where the fingers fight and then decided they don’t really need the thumb. The thumb agrees to just go and have a rest and leave other fingers to fend for themselves – when they try to pick up a pen and write, or close some buttons, or even catch a ball, they run into troubles. Realising, they can’t quite do it without the thumb. They make peace and start working together again – even though they’re all different – short, long, bending this way and that – they are very strong when working in unity and harmony.
We finished our lesson for today by making little ‘hand-puppets’, out of popsicle sticks and foam-hand-shapes, to remind us of the story, that even though we’re all different and have different roles, looks etc – we’re only reaching our real strength when we work together.
Next week we’ll continue with our lesson and work through the story and drama elements we didn’t get to today. See you all then!
Just a quick picture from our stall at the Whiti te Rā festival at the park yesterday. Lots of music, people and happy faces. We did crafts and facepainting at the shared stall for Ko te Aroha and our childrens class (Te Whakakotahitanga o te Rāwhiti). The banner the children made last week, looked awesome! 🙂
See you all next Sunday (11 Dec) for our year-end class and certificate hand-out. Bring your family and whanau to share some morning tea as well and enjoy the songs and fellowship.
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 praye