Hari OM                                        Sunday Nov 1st 2015

We started the class with our starting prayer. The kids are getting used to the new class room and enthusiastically participating in the class. 

This week class, almost every student came up but for Anupriya.

We continued our journey on learning various symbols of Ganesha, its meaning and relevance to the day-to-day life. During the class all the ideals of Ganesha, his various names were re-inforced again. The students were able to remember, recollect the stories, anectodes and the various meanings. 

The discussion centered around why Ganesha has an elephant phase and what each part of the body symbolizes. 

Here are a few

Big ears - Listening

Trunk - Discriminate between Good and bad

Big belly - store the knowledge learnt.

mouse -  Controlling the mind / thoughts.

We had couple of small experiments as the kids challenged it is easy to "doing nothing". For two minutes, they had trouble keeping quiet (doing nothing). Somewhere giggling, tapping the foot, smiling etc. We explained how tough it is to "not do anything". One need to control the mind to be quiet and how tough it is to control a mouse. That Ganesha chose mouse as his vehicle symbolizes how important it is to control the mind and how he leads by example and that the kids need to practice. 

The other experiment we did was to have Dhruv outside the class and gave instructions to the rest of the students on what to do. One of the student was asked to give instructions when Dhruv returns, while everyone but one person would follow it and Dhruv has to find the person who was not listening (or who was sleeping when the game was explained). Anupriya gave the instructions and Suchir played the person who was not listening. Being a small class, Dhruv was able to figure it out quickly. However, the kids understood that how important is listening and that symbolized by Ganesha.

Followed by this we did Guru Stotram. Almost all class can read it easily and half has mastery over it. We asked Isha and Sitara to read the 1st slokha every day with the japa mala and log it in the prayer log. The rest can say all the slokhas everyday and log it.

We played "hang man", this time around the couple of kids volunteered to pick the words and everyone participated.

There is no class the following week and our next class is on Nov 15th. We are planning some craft work. So please have the kids bring color markers, scissors and glue stick.

Happy Diwali to all.