Sevikas: Nanda, Indira, Kalpana and Jacqueline. Special thanks to all the helper moms who joined the class today.
Home Fun Work: Print out and color this page
Have your child practice saying aloud numbers 1-5 and colors in Sanskrit.
Morning Prayers:
• Saha Naavavatu (click here for text)
• Sarasvati Namastubhyam (click here for text)
Quiet Time: Three OMs followed by one minute of silence
Bhajans: Ganapati, Ganapati (click here for text and audio)
Gita Chanting: none (click here for text, audio and on-line registration)
Likhita Japa: none
Letter of the Week: X is for Excellence
Activity and Games: Sanskrit Games
• Colors - red, green, blue, yellow and purple (click here for text)
• Identify Devanagari script numbers 1-5 (click here for text)
• KrishnaH Vadati (click here for complete text)
• Read Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton (in Sanskrit) (click here for text)
Comments: Today was another topsy-turvy day for us. We surprised the children by conducting our entire class on the stage in the auditorium. Because our annual program is literally less than 2 months away, we will be seizing every Balavihar opportunity we can to use the auditorium for class. We expect that the more our young friends can practice being up there, the less stage fright we will encounter on the big day itself.
After our morning prayers and quiet time, Aunty gathered all the children in a circle and reviewed the story of our play — "E is for Enthusiasm." For those who are not familiar with our play's script: we will be performing the tale when Lord Raama sroked the little squirrels for helping build the bridge to Lanka ... hence the three stripes that are on their back.
Our real fun and chaos began after the story recap. Several of the puppets were assembled and distributed to the kids. We started the rehearsal with learning how we should enter and exit the stage. After a few rounds of this, the kids clearly got the rhythm down. In fact, we all gave ourselves a huge two thumbs up — उत्तमम! (uttamam, excellent) This was a big moment of joy (and relief) for the aunties :-)
Now our challenge was how to rehearse with the puppets, script, and 40 children. After a few attempts to try and calm all the excitement down, we decided that our best strategy for today would be to divide the children into two smaller groups — one group remained on stage to practice their parts while the other group disappeared to the back of the auditorium and played games in Sanskrit. We're thinking that until our adult volunteers are able to consistently join us for rehearsals, that this might be the best solution to our "Kindergarten Enthusiasm."
Here's something hard to believe: our Geeta Chanting Competition is coming up in just a few weeks! Boy did time fly — it seems like it was just one or two months ago when we started working with the first two lines of the first shloka. Please be sure and reward your children for all their hard work this year by registering them for the competion. We have seen such growth with all the kids these past months ... with their pronunciation, enthusiasm and memorization. Clearly, the parents deserve a big "उत्तमम्" for all of their hard work!
We promised the children that we will keep last week's "Home Fun Work" coloring page on blog. We did not tell them what the picture was off — it is going to be a surprise for them, and they will come to class next week and let us know what they colored.
Today was defintely one active day — this aunty is willing to bet that all the adults took a good rest when they got home.
See everyone next week for another fun class!
Pujya Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda
