Report of how the class went: Snowbound City
Ruhi Book 3 – Teaching
Bahá’í Children’s Classes
Grade 2 (ages 7-8)
Set 7
Lesson 19
“The Snowbound City”
Last night, eight happy, noisy children showed up for the grade 2 class, plus three adults. So, we were packed around the dining room table spread with:
- a cartoony-homemade story map (gives children an idea of the setting of a story)
- homemade toilet paper (TP) roll people
- other props: TP roll tree, apartment building, strange little TP roll houses – my husband’s creative idea!
Our simple cartoony story map for the snowbound city and the TP roll people and other props were necessary props for building suspense, interest, and eagerness to participate.
- Note: our children are unfamiliar with grown-up activities. They responded well to the new concepts and by end of the story, they knew that they were in a children’s class just like the story. The children come from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds. Also, we live in sunny, summer-all-year-round Singapore, so we don’t experience snow.
Oh, I wish there had been a few toy cars to move along the streets of our homemade story-map. That would have been great fun for the boys. A lot of the boys in our class love cars!
We began our grade 2 lesson after prayer and singing in the larger group with grade 1 and the little 3-4-year-olds.
At first, we reviewed the unit topic, “consultation“. Even though we had not met for 2 weeks, they remembered what each letter in C-O-N-S-U-L-T-A-T-I-O-N stood for – letter word association, hurray! The participation in the review was excellent and a good introducing to a story about how and why Bahá’ís consult.
As the C-O-N-S-U-L-T-A-T-I-O-N cards were tucked away, out came a pair of dice with 16 reading discs for the story, lots of paragraphs for easy reading comprehension. The reading circles were numbered. Kids rolled the dice and counted the dots.
They could choose:
- one die, or
- the total of both dice, or
- 1+3 could equal 13.
That was fun for them. They loved rolling the dice and were amazed that “7” was rolled 6 times in a row in combinations of 1+6, 2+5, 3+4; interesting, right?
We started reading in numbered order and when the story came to snow falling, cotton balls fell on the STORY MAP. The kids loved it and all was chaos for a few moments. It was fun!
In the end, we all enjoyed the story and made more TP roll people (even the adults) to populate our paper snowbound STORY MAP. Because we are in Singapore, our little people wore ethnic costumes from our area. CUTE! a sari in the snow.
Just wanted to share that our experiment was a success with keeping the interest of the students and their participation exemplary.
It was a lot of work. We will use the TP roll people and paper map for other stories.
We would love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.
Love,
Mine Rich in Gems family