Hari Om Parents,
We started today's class with opening prayers - Sahanavavatu, Vakratunda, Karagre vasane lakshmi, Sri Rama rameti, etc. We want to devote the first five minutes of the class to chanting these shlokas in every class.
We continued learning the Krishnashtakam. We repeated the first verse today and explained the meaning.
Before we proceeded to the next lesson, we did a recap of what the kids learnt in 3rd grade Bala vihar. We briefly discussed the story of Parikshit's curse as an introduction to the Bhagavatam stories. The story goes like this -
One day, King Parikshit goes hunting. Losing track of time he goes deep into the jungle. Tired and thirsty, he comes upon Sage Samika's ashram. There he finds the sage sitting with his eyes closed. He asks the sage for water many times. The sage, who is in deep meditation, is unaware of this, and does not respond. This angers the King, and he picks up a dead snake lying nearby and puts it around the sage's neck. The Sage still continues to meditate. The sage's son, who returns to the ashram sees this and is enraged. He curses King Pariksit that on the seventh day, the King will be bitten to death by a deadly snake, Takshaka. The King is unaware of this and returns to his palace. He realizes his fault and is upset with himself for having done such a bad thing. In the meantime, the sage who completed his meditation finds out about the curse, scolds his son for giving such a cruel curse, and sends the information about the curse to the King, so he is well prepared.
The King feels that he deserves the curse. He gives up his kingdom to his son, and starts living on the banks of Ganga. There many sages including Suka Deva visit him. He wants to spend the last few days of his life thinking of the Lord. SukaDeva teaches him how to meditate, and starts telling him the Bhagavatam stories.
The kids learnt many stories from Srimad Bhagavatam in 3rd grade. We did a picture quiz to refresh their memory and for kids who did not attend 3rd grade Balavihar it was like an introduction to what we will learn in class this year. Pictures of Lord Vishnu's first five avatars and some incidents from other stories like Dhruva, Prahalada, Gajendra moksha and churning of the milky ocean were shown. The kids participated very enthusiastically, and they answered almost all the questions!
We then proceeded to the second part of today's lesson, from My 24 teachers.
The "24 teachers" comes from chapter 11 of the Bhagavatam. Lord Krishna narrates to Uddhava, his follower, the dialogue between King Yadu and Saint Dattatreya. King Yadu sees the ever bright and happy Dattatreya and asks him how it is possible to always be happy. Saint Dattatreya tells him that he learnt this from the 24 teachers. Who the 24 teachers are, we briefly introduced the list last week. This week we discussed one of them.
We asked the kids a riddle."I have eight siblings, I never sit still, I keep revolving causing days, nights and seasons. I am shaped like a sphere. Who am I ?"
The answer was "Earth". Today's teacher that we learnt about was Mother Earth.
To clear any confusion that may arise, we talked about how Pluto was recently designated as a minor planet, but for the purposes of this chapter, earth still has eight siblings.
We told the kids how before we get off the bed in the morning and put our feet on the ground, we have to pray to Mother earth and ask for forgiveness for touching our feet to her by reciting the shloka- Samudra vasane Devi Parvata stana mandale Vishnu patni namastubhyam Paada sparsham kshamasvame.
Mother Earth is a symbol of patience, tolerance, endurance and forgiveness. We discussed each of these qualities with simple examples, like not getting impatient and losing your cool when stuck in traffic. We also told some stories to make the concepts more clear to the kids. The qualities of Mother Earth that we have to learn were explained in the form of stories.
Patience -
One story was about a Scientist. He did twenty seven years of research and had huge stacks of paper with all the notes written down. His maid/helper left the job, so a new person replaces her. The new helper is very enthusiastic about cleaning the house, so she throws away all the old stacks of paper in the garbage and keeps new paper in the scientist's room. The scientist sees all the years of work gone into the garbage. He calmly tells the helper not to remove any papers from his room, going forward but does not lose his patience and yell... because there was no use.
Forgiveness -
A boy loved mangoes and went daily to a mango tree, threw stones at it, and enjoyed the fruit that fell from the tree. One day as he threw a stone, it accidentally hit the King who was going that way. The King is furious and orders the guards to imprison the boy and punish him. The boy had always thrown stones at the tree, he was never punished and in fact, rewarded with delicious mangoes. Just once he hit the King, and he was not ready to forgive. We hurt Mother Earth in so many ways, and she is always forgiving. But it is so difficult for us to forgive even a small mistake others make.
Next was the story of the Giving tree. It's about an apple tree that loved a little boy who came to her everyday and played with her leaves and branches everyday. The boy grows up and doesn't return for a long time. When he returns one day, he doesn't want to play with the tree anymore, but wants money, to buy a house and to get married. The tree offers her fruit and tells him to sell them and make money. The tree keeps giving the boy her fruits, her branches and everything she possibly can, to make the boy happy, until she remains just an old stump at the end.
This story shows how humans are greedy and keep taking from nature, from the earth, but don't give anything back in return.
Be steadfast like the thumb, an African folktale was narrated. Once all the five fingers were side by side on the hand. One day the fingers saw a golden ring. All the fingers except for the thumb wanted to wear the ring. The thumb firmly refused as the ring did not belong to them. The other four fingers did not like this, they complained and made fun of the thumb and asked it to stay away from them.
Mountains are an extension of the Earth, and symbolize steadfastness.
Sometimes we need to be steadfast like the thumb and erect like the mountain to uphold good values and principles.
After this we moved on to Gita chanting. We played a primer video, which teaches the right way to pronounce certain syllables and words, which will help with chanting the Shlokas. We introduced the kids to the first shloka for this year, which is Shloka 39 of Chapter 2.
We concluded the class with Aarthi and Pledge.
We look forward to seeing the kids in class next Sunday.
Pranaam,
Neelima & Keerthi