Special Events

Baha'u'llah birthday

We celebrated Baha'u'llah's birthday by a story/coloring project and by making a cake. It was a blast!

Introduction to Baha'u'llah

We had hard time to figure out how to introduce Baha'u'llah to 3-4 year olds. They do not yet understand the complexities of the history, the relationships between religions, etc. But finally, I think, we managed to come up with a very simple way to introduce Baha'u'llah that is completely understandable to kids so young.

We used these coloring sheets to tell our story (we actually had them little colored by an adult so that the pictures would be more attractive to watch). The main gist of the story is that Baha'u'llah is like a teacher. Except teachers in day care teach our minds, while Baha'u'llah teaches our hearts. He teaches us about unity, pure heart, kindly heart, and radiant heart (these were the lessons we have covered with kids so far). We did a lot of interactive story-telling, by asking kids simple questions like these: Whats your teacher's name at day care? What do teachers teach? Do they teach numbers? What is this? (Pointing at the picture of Earth) Are the kids in this picture mean to each other? Should we be mean to each other? How can we be kind? How can we show our love to others? Etc. We went through the story twice, second time asking kids to re-tell it (they did it with difficulties). Then we had another set of the same coloring sheets (but not colored in) and the kids got to color the pictures. Once we were done coloring, we went through the story again, now with the pictures they colored themselves.

We have found it challenging to keep kids attention to listen the stories. Therefore, we try to come up with ideas to help keep their focus. This time we used these techniques:

• showed pictures to help them focus,
• asked them questions to keep them actively engaged,
• relate the stories to their own life for relevance (for example, we told them that their ancestral countries are all on Earth)
• repeat, repeat, repeat for retention (we told the story three times: second telling was with their help, third after they finished coloring

To decorate, we had put whipped cream into small ziplock bags. We made a tiny hole in one corner and showed them how you can squeeze the cream out. They had lots of fun with that. And finally, to top the cake off they put their favorite berries on top. The result was delicious! And the kids were proud of their creations. Parents got to taste it too. Once done we reminded them the occasion, Baha'u'llah's birthday.