18 April ~ God and Creation

We did Lessons 2 & 3 from The Light of a Good Character. They are pretty short!

We started with the song God Wants All Girls and Boys to Pray and recited some of the prayers they already know. Then I taught them "O Thou Who art the most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden!" from Baha'u'llah's prayer that begins "Create in me a pure heart, O my God, and renew a tranquil conscience within me, O my Hope!" My 5yo likes that prayer, it seems, and recites it unbidden during our morning prayers.

I read to them Lesson 2 - God is Near. It discusses - Can we see the sun? Hear the sun? Can we see the wind? Hear the wind? Can we see or hear God? Well, no, but "we know that God loves us because He has given us so many good things." That sort of leads in to Lesson 3 - God is Our Creator.

But before that, I read to them a book of Baha'u'llah's "Blessed is the Spot" prayer. Lisa Blecker beautifully illustrates: "Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified." The book steps through many beautiful pictures of God's creation.

We learned a new song as part of Lesson 3. This song is also by Roberta Christian and Eugene Babcock. The lyrics are as follows.

Here's a song I like to sing,

God created everything.

I do not know just what He is,

But everything that is, is His.

As a craft to go along with God and God's creation, I found something at http://perpetualpreschool.com/christianthemes/bible_themes/creation_art.htm. They decorated little boxes and I wrote "God's Treasures" on the top of each box. Then we went on a nature walk and collected things that God made. After they had collected a bit, we sat on the grass and I pulled from my pocket pieces of paper with Baha'u'llah's name and a nine-pointed star printed on them. They put those in their boxes. Then I pulled out a photograph of each of them to put in their boxes. My 3yo wanted to know what else was in my pocket!