Continuing at age 7 and 8

These are our attempts to introduce the Grade 2 (Book 3) classes to our children's class group (most children are not from Bahai families). We try to post activities that we tried to use to help our 7-8 year old children (we have also 2 four-year-old siblings in class) understand the materials in Grade 2 lessons.

Our general class organization is as follows:

• To start out, we sing songs and say prayers.
• Then have a discussion on day's topic.
• In each class we try to have at least one activity that is both interesting and related to the topic at hand.
• When the students get restless, we have some kind of physical activity. Examples are:
  • Split the kids to two groups, send one group to one end of room, the other to the other. One by one they have to move from one group to another while:
    • blowing a ball in front of them,
    • blowing a cotton-ball through a straw,
    • stepping forward on two pieces of paper (they are only allowed to step on paper),
    • walking while holding a piece of paper on a straw (while blowing in on the straw creating a vacuum), etc.
  • We try to make sure that these activities do not become competition as this might break the team spirit.
• We have a particular sound that calls the kids to start the program and that calls the kids back from the break activity.
• Our other activities include as listed in the Grade 2: story time, drama, and drawing. But we won't manage to do all of these activities in all classes, rather, we break them up across different classes.
• We reflect back on what we learned.
• Closing prayers.

Perhaps because we also have younger siblings in class, we are still working on transitions. Sometimes it is hard for students to transition from one activity to another. A warning that we will transition soon seems to help a lot and we need to keep in mind to use it.