Today we had three kids, and the theme was Kindness to Animals. We began with the prayer 'Blessed is the Spot', which we first sang with the actions, and then we just did the actions with no singing.
The kids making pictures today
The kids making pictures todayStory: We told the story of St. Francis of Assisi taming the 'wolf of Gubbio' by being gentle, feeding it and taking care of it. We learned that the story is a legend, around 800 years old, and that although we know that St. Francis was a real person, and that he was known for being gentle, we don't know for sure if the stories about him (like the wolf of Gubbio) are all true. But the example of kindness to the wolf in the story kicked off our class on kindness to animals.
Music: We learned the song "If an animal be sick" by Joe Crone (words from the Baha'i Writings), and sang it over a few times. Then we each chose an animal and invented our own line, and it became a chant that ended up like this:
Listen to the snake: hiss hiss hiss
Listen to the cat: meow meow meow!
Listen to the T-Rex: roar roar roar!
Listen to the wolf: owwwwwwwwwww!
Listen to the humming bird: hummmmmmmmmm
We each said our own part of the chant, keeping us in rhythm together. Then we chose instruments that we thought sounded like our animals and transferred the rhythm to those. We had snake on a shaker, cat on xylophone bells, T-rex on a djembe drum, wolf on finger cymbals, and humming bird on a guiro. We played the whole chant several times through without words, and kept together on the rhythm.
Then we read more ta, tee-tee and quarter-rest rhythm flashcards, first saying them, and then playing them on hand drums as we read the notes. Everyone seemed to pick it up very well, and we'll continue with the rhythm reading for a while until everyone can read their own rhythms and play them on a drum.
Craft: We folded regular paper into four parts, and pasted the four parts of the quote about being kind to animals onto the four sections. Here are some more photos of what the kids created:
