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Here we have gathered some of our attempts to run children's classes for our then 3-year-old children. We hope that by posting our ideas here we can inspire you too and, hopefully, you can share your wonderful ideas about how to involve children of such young age in Bahá'í inspired learning.
We have organized our classes around the virtues. We use quotes, songs, crafts, and activities to try to teach the virtues to our children. Some things work well, others not so well... Sometimes the children are listening, sometimes we have to put most of our energy in disciplining them. We hope that by trying to collect good ideas here we can make it easier for other parents.
General format of the class
We have our class on Sunday mornings. We find this to be the best time - kids are the most alert and the easiest to control. We tried it once at 5pm and it was very difficult to keep our toddlers' attention. Here is how we usually run the class:
1) Everybody arrives, children play, run around.
2) We start with song-along songs to get everybody's attention. Sometimes we use shakers to make it a bit more attractive to our toddlers.
3) We say the quote for the day (several times, with music and with hand movements) and possibly a prayer.
4) We have our activities (stories, arts, physical activities, anything we can think of). We try to keep each activity relatively short - about 10 minutes or so (in reality I think we go for a little longer). We usually have about three activities in each class.
5) To start out the class (to transition from play to class) and in-between activities we do a human train. We hold hands and walk around singing a marching tune that Warren created. It is a fun interlude and helps kids to refocus.
6) We close with songs and prayers.
7) We have fruit cut for everybody to snack on after class.
8) Once kids are off to playing, parents reflect on the class and brainstorm on the next one. We find this reflection very useful.
Here is the recording of the "Walking together" song, created and performed by Warren Waren.
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