Teaching Activities Roundtable

Dara Gay Shaw, Ed.D.

Activity presented at the 29th Annual Conference of the Association for
Bahá'í Studies of North America, Cambridge, MA, August 11-14, 2005


    Last year at the Association of Bahá'í Studies Conference in Calgary, Nancy Waters, author of the Virtues Gazette taught the Bahá'í Language Educators some wonderful activities to use with their students on encouragement. Inspired by her presentation, I decided to implement some lessons on spiritual qualities with my elementary school English Language Learners. I began with this simple kindness lesson plan which incorporates all four basic skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing.

    One way to design a Bahá'í inspired curriculum is to include many outside sources to accompany directly Bahá'í materials from Bahá'í publishing venues. Many wonderful publications are available, which can easily be used or adapted for use in public school classrooms. Some materials which might be useful are the stories in Vignettes from the Life of Abdu'l-Bahá, a book which is organized according to different spiritual qualities; or prayer cards and illuminated quotes from the writings such as Abdu'l-Bahá's prayer that begins "O God! Educate these children…" In fact, one of my colleagues, who is not a Bahá'í, had an illuminated prayer card that a Bahá'í had given her, displayed prominently in her classroom. Other colleagues displayed the Golden Rule poster card distributed by Special Ideas, Inc. that I gave them. Next year, I plan to do a series of lessons with the songs on Red Grammer's "Teaching Peace" CD at the beginning of the school year, to set a tone of world citizenship and intercultural understanding.

    In preparing my contribution for the roundtable, I searched the Internet for free resources for future lessons on spiritual qualities, that come from non-Bahá'í sources. I share my simple lesson plan, and these other resources here for my colleagues to explore.

Kindness Lesson Plan


Goal:
    To encourage elementary English Language Learners (ELLs) to reflect on kindness, and to see their classmates as kind people.

Objectives:

    By the end of this lesson students will:
  1. brainstorm on the meaning of kindness
  2. listen to a story about kindness;
  3. retell parts of the story;
  4. tell a story about how they were kind or someone they knew showed kindness,
  5. write their story
  6. illustrate their story.

Materials: A story appropriate for children from the Random Acts of Kindness Book, a tape recorder, paper, pencils, markers, crayons, and colored pencils.

Activities:

    The students discuss the meaning of kindness with the teacher. The teacher writes their ideas on the board. Then, the students listen to a story about kindness as a group. The students take turns retelling parts of the story they listened to. Then, each of the students tells a story from their own life experience about kindness into the tape recorder. They write (multiple drafts) and illustrate their own kindness story. The teacher collects the stories and makes a class book on kindness. Each student receives his or her own copy.

Evaluation (Assessment) Completion of the activities.

    My students enjoyed and completed this activity.

Resources


Nancy Watters, MA publishes "The Virtues Gazette" which is available free of charge. It has a different virtue featured every month, a section on affirmations and reflections, research briefs, and world quotes on that virtue.
http://VirtueConsulting.com

On the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation's website, there are pages of free lesson plans and student activities.
http://www.actsofkindness.org/classroom/plans

Character Counts is a program used in many public schools in the United States. They offer free teaching tools.
http://www.charactercounts.org

HumanityQuest has listed an extensive list of what they call "human values" . Though some of their list can hardly be called values, some of their listings yield productive results. I looked up thankfulness, and there were many good suggestions for classroom activities. This is a site that is open to contributions.
http://www.humanityquest.com/topic/art_activities

An excellent list of Tolerance Resources can be found on http://www.ccsf.edu/Resources/Tolerance/res.html

The web pages of Teaching Tolerance, a branch of the Southern Poverty Law Center, also has excellent materials, that are available free to teachers. They have links to lesson plans and student classroom and community activities.

http://www.tolerance.org
A Boston University Education Department website has lesson plans, and extensive recommended books separated by grade.
http://bu.edu/education/caec

Teachers Against Prejudice features an essay contest, and an extensive list of recommended films, some of them with teacher's guides.
http://www.teachersagainsprejudice.org

Google "Kip Cates"- He has wonderful ideas and lessons about global issues. TESOL members, can subscribe to TESOLers for Social Responsibility. They also feature many useful teaching ideas.

Please submit more links on teaching spiritual qualities to our Bahá'í Language Educators listserv

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