Meeting For Worship

From the beginning days of school, we have been engaged in shared silence with our children where we settle our bodies and relax our mind and keep our voices quiet within....

We begin our daily morning meeting each day with shared moments of silence as well as when we gather together for lunch. The children have grown in their ability and comfort level in settling themselves into silence as a group. We have all come to appreciate and recognize the beauty of the 'sounds of silence' together and we often comment about the many sounds we do hear when we all become quite..... We settle , we calm ourselves and we are renewed with the gifts that shared silence brings to our PreK community.

This year, the teachers of the Pre K and Kindergarten children have had many conversations about how to introduce and bring our youngest students into the more formal Meeting For Worship experience that is practiced every Wednesday in the Meetinghouse with Lower School. How do we introduce the abstract concepts associated with Meeting For Worship and how do we make this experience make sense for the youngest children in our AFS community...?

We decided to approach MFW in a very intentional way this year. We began by having a short MFW time in our classrooms each week. We prepared the children by reading a few excellent books about children attending Meeting and talked about some of the behaviors that help us to quiet our bodies and settle. We found that lighting a candle and sitting in a large circle on our meeting rug was a helpful way for us to center and know that this was the time for MFW. As the children grew more comfortable with the concept of MFW, we branched out and joined PreK 1 and Kindergarten in the music room to experience MFW as a fuller community. Raji guided our group through this process by asking thoughtful questions and reflecting on insightful observations. We all felt really good about these shared experiences together and were reminded how important it is for all of the children to have the opportunities to make connections with each other in our PreK/K wing.

The next step involved joining with PreK /K and 3rd grade partners. Third graders partner with K for MFW and we decided to ask 3rd grade to help guide us in learning more about what MFW really is all about. Our next MFW was held in the music room with 3rd grade and the 3rd graders took the leadership role in talking about what MFW means to them and how they learned to settle themselves into silence with strategies that may help the younger children. Again, observing children in multi aged group settings reminded us of the important leaning that takes place between the youngest students and the older students and how we must provide experiences for this growth to occur. The third graders had the chance to be true leaders and role models for the younger children. This opportunity facilitates the development of self confidence and self esteem and it was so wonderful to see new relationships and connections begin to evolve.

For our next MFW, we decided to actually go to the Meetinghouse and have MFW in the beautiful space where Lower School meets each week. The fall walk with our PreK , K and 3rd grade friends was breathtaking! We made several stops along the pathway to appreciate the many wonders of fall.

The children settled on the benches and our time in the Meetinghouse was so special.

At lunch , a few of the children at our table reflected on our first experience in in the Meetinghouse:

What were your thoughts about MFW today......

Davie: I like it in the Meetinghouse because you got quiet and it felt peaceful.

Annabelle: I like it because there is no screaming so loud that it hurts my ears.

Hayden: I like it because it was really quiet and we get to think about things. i liked when it was not noisy and I could think about what I did at the Franklin Institute.

Kailyn: I like when I said hello to my sister. I was thinking about seeing all the beautiful trees in the fall.

Robby: I like it because it's kind of like swimming under water; because it's really, really quiet and that's the same as swimming under water this is also really, really quiet.

We look so forward to the peaceful feelings that Wednesdays always bring for us at AFS...