The focus this past weekend for the Alluem Kids was "Trust". When I asked the children what the word "Trust" meant, they responded with, "To rely on someone or something.", "To believe.", "Something you have to gain." and my favorite answer was from a 9 year old, "Something you have to give in order to get." Beautifully said. Kids trust their parents, their grandparents, their teachers, their pediatrician. When you're a kid, it seems as though you have to trust everyone older then you because they are the wise ones. They are the ones that have the knowledge. They are the ones who have been through it before. I personally believe kids also have to trust themselves - body and mind. After having the kids meditate for a minute on the word "Trust" and what it means to them, we played a game called "The Trust Walk". The kids paired off and one child from each group was blindfolded. The job of the "seeing" child was to lead the blindfolded child safely around the room. The "seeing" child used verbal commands - turn left, turn right, step over, stop - while being led by their elbow. The job of the blindfolded child was to trust. Trust their partner to be their eyes and lead them around the room without getting hurt. Trusting your peers can be more of a challenge then if an adult was leading them around, so I was interested to see what came up. After they circled around the room stepping over bolsters and dodging the other children, they lead their partners back to their mat and each instructed the other into a yoga pose of their choice while still blindfolded. Often when I instruct, I see the children relying on me to lead by doing rather then just my verbal cues. This was a good opportunity to test that. Their partners were to talk them through the pose and not allowed to move them into the pose. The blindfolded child had to listen carefully and use their spacial awareness to move into the poses.
The discussion part of the class I raised some questions:
-Is it easy to trust someone?
-Why is trusting someone so important?
-What did it feel like to be lead around the room having to trust your partner?
-What did it feel like to lead someone around the room having that person trust you?
As discussions often do, one topic lead to another - what it would feel like to be blind. If we lost our sight suddenly, we would have to completely rely on and trust other people to be our eyes and guide us through life. We would have to trust in our other senses which are often heightened when we lose one. We would have to trust our intuition to keep us from harms way.
After our discussion, the children worked on acrostic poems using the word "Trust". Each letter in the word is made into it's own word related to the word "Trust". Below is an example of one of my 10 year olds:
T - Truthfulness
R - Resting on a promise
U - Understanding
S - Senses
T - To believe
When we trust each other, we have the ability to do great things. I hope this activity really sticks with the kids. Trust is important in this world - trust in others and trust in ourselves.
Love that picture. The poems on TRUST are a great idea, I'll have to give that a try.
ReplyDeleteI find that trust in our ourselves is the key to self esteem. It was a big step for me when I started trusting myself. Sometimes it even felt like I was walking around with a blind fold on!
This game really helps kids get a first hand experience of that. I also use it in kids yoga and its always a big success.