Sevikas: Mamtha Rao and Jacqueline Gaines
Home Fun Work:
• Click here for the next drawing in our animal series.
• Click here for a mandala drawing to practice likhita japa with.
• Click here for a tracing sheet to practice writing राम
• Click here for a tracing sheet to practice writing ऊँ नमः शिवाय
Extra Home Fun Work: Click here for Flashcard Study Set. Practice identifying the God/Goddess in each picture. And see if you can identify some of the names in Sanskrit!
Morning Prayers:
• OM Saha Navaavatu (click here for text)
• OM Vakratunda Mahaakaaya (click here for text)
• Sarasvati Namastubhyam (click here for text)
• Shree Krishnah (click here for text)
• Shree Hanumaan (click here for text)
Quiet Time: None (click here for game instructions)
Geeta Chanting: Chapter 11, Shlokas 1–8 (click here for audio and text)
Letter of the Week: "T is for Truth"
Story: The Empty Pot, by Demi (click here to view book cover)
Likhita Japa: The children continued to write in their journals, finishing some of the mandalas from last week. We also introduced a new mandala for them to begin working on.
Ending Prayers: Done in the auditorium
Comments: We missed a lot of our young friends today ... hope you guys aren't sick and just forgot about the time change :-)
Today was a shortened class because we went to the auditorium for our ending prayers. We started our morning with the usual chit chat ... catching up on all the "happening details of our kindergarten friends." Afterwards, we settled down for our weekly disciplines and Geeta Chanting. We gotta say: "These kids are doing great!!!" Not only were we completely surprised to learn that most everyone in class has the Shree Hanumaan shloka memorized, but these youngsters were really belting out the first 7 shlokas of Geeta, Chapter 11!! Pronunciation was perfect! Posture was looking good!! We were originally scheduled to start Shloka 8 in our first April class, but we thought because everyone was doing so well, we could go ahead and start chanting all 8. We are very confident that these children are going to do well in May!
Our letter of the week was "T is for Truth." This is always a fun letter to discuss, because we all know that we must always tell the truth — no matter what. But the real question is: Do we always do that? And if not, why?? We investigated some of the reasons why someone might hesitate to tell the truth ... such as: "being afraid of getting in trouble," "wanting to impress your friends," "trying to act cool," etc. Everyone had a story to tell :-) So, before we moved to our Likhita Japa segment, we read a really great story about Truthfulness to help us punctuate how important it is to be honest. The book is called "The Empty Pot" by Demi. (You can hear it read in this week's video selections — see the announcement section.) Anyway, we were all moved by the brave act of little Ping in bringing his empty pot to the Emperor. (This aunty never fails to get a little choked up when the Emperor questions Ping.) It proves that we must always be brave and truthful, even if it seems difficult — only good things will come of it.
And ... we talked about the beauty of the illustrations. In this book the artist chose to paint the pictures in the style of the traditional Chinese landscape art — where the landscapes are quite majestic, and the people are always shown very small in scale (unlike our Western art.) This lead to a discussion on the word "Humble." which we all agreed we could add to our Vedanta alphabet.
Before we knew it, time was up and we had to get ready to head to the auditorium for the 9th grade performance — which was really fun to watch, by the way.
We hope you all have a great week — and we look forward to seeing everyone again next Sunday. Hopefully, the effects of our time change will be over :-)
Hugs to all our young friends!
