Sevikas: Mamtha Rao and Jacqueline Gaines
Click here to see this week's art gallery.
Home Funwork:
• Practice writing राम (Raama) Click here for the tracing sheet.
• Print out the following two activity pages and have your child draw the animals. Practice pronouncing the words, in Sanskrit, with them.
For extra fun: Click here for the Flashcards (at Quizlet.com) to learn some animal names in Sanskrit. This aunty uses Quizlet flash cards to study with. They are really fun — in addition to using them for learning, you can also play games and test yourself :-)
Click here for more card sets and have fun!! We will continue to add learning sets throughout the Balavihar year — so be on the lookout ;-)
Morning Prayers:
• OM saha naavavatu (click here for text)
• Vakratunda Mahaakaaya (click here for text)
• Sarasvati Namastubhyam (click here for text)
• Shree Hanumaan (click here for text)
• Shree KrishnaH (click here for text)
Quiet Time: 1 minute of silence with very accurate shell counting! (click here for game instructions)
Geeta Chanting: Chapter 11, Shlokas 1, 2, 3 and 4 (click here for audio and text)
Letter of the Week: "I is for Intelligence"
Story: Ganesha Circles His Parents
Activity: Drew an elephant (click here for activity page)
Likhita Japa: None (click here for tracing sheet)
Comments: Boy it sure was great to be back in class again today. All of our young friends were well rested and ready to go — on time!
We began our very busy class with our morning prayers. We added a new prayer, "Shree Hanumaan" to our weekly curriculum. The children did a super job in repeating the shloka after the aunties. We also spent some time talking about what this prayer means.
After our morning disciplines, we then moved to our letter of the day: "I is for ....." We got lots of great answers from our friends ... some of which were pretty sophisticated, we might add. "I is for Infinity," "I is for Impossible," "I is for India," and "I is for Indra." Then someone shouted out the magic word — "Intelligent." That was it!!!
We spent a good chunk of time talking about "What is a mind?" and "What is Intelligence?" "What is the difference between the two?" "How are we different from animals, who also have a mind?" We discussed how our mind is responsible for learning about things. And that also our emotions — happiness, sadness, fear, etc. come from the mind. But that our intellect is far more subtler. This is what is responsible for our actions. Our decisions about how to act, in a "right" or "wrong" way, is based on using our intellect. Not easy stuff to digest ....
And so, to illustrate this concept a little more concretely, we told the story of Lord Ganesha circling the world for the celestial fruit. Ahhh .... just what we needed — this definitely helped us understand more clearly!!
We are sorry that we were not able to do our Likhita Japa segment today. Time ran out. Please print out the tracing sheet (above) and have your child continue to practice at home. We have another mini-break coming up and we certainly don't want the children to forget the writing strokes. We will be introducing journal keeping at the end of January ... with their very own personal likhita japa book.
In the meantime, stay warm. Forecast calls for more snow — go figure. Kids, we'll keep our fingers crossed for a "Snow Day." Drink lots of hot chocolate ....
And keep practicing your Geeta shlokas. You guys did great today!!
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Jokes from some of the kids during our circle time:
1) What do a tree and elephant have in common?
a trunk
2) Why was 5 afraid of 6?
Because 7 8 9.
Pujya Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda
