children's classes, number rods and solar systems

The children's Baha'i school just started in Boston. Sasha will be attending every week, and James will be teaching a class for the older kids (ages 6-8)!

Sasha with her friend, Amira (5 years old), before classes started:




The children are learning how to be kind, compassionate and generous, as well as learning to express themselves by using the language of the virtues. They practiced saying nice things to each other using the virtues.

Here she is in a class with other children closer to her age:




Sasha has been really interested in counting and writing numbers and letters. Here she is playing with her number rods. Once she can line them in order, she can see that 10 is the longest rod, while 1 is the shortest. These number rods help children visualize quantities.

In this picture, she is counting the bars and writing down the number:




I helped her write the number 5, but the rest she did completely on her own!



The teachers took this one at school - matching textures:



She's been learning about the solar system, so we molded the planets out of these interesting play dough-like, foam beads (called Play Foam). They're hanging in the background of this picture, with a big, yellow balloon for the sun.
She really likes them! We tried to make them to scale, and we did a fairly good job. She held each planet in her hand while we talked about fun facts about each one, like that Pluto is a ball of ice and not really a planet at all. Or that Jupiter is a big ball of gas. There are lots of good books out there about the solar system - Very simple, and with beautiful images.