Learning About the Baha'i Faith

My name is Katie Dryden. I am the sixth grade investigations teacher this summer, and I am also fortunate enough to be able to co-teach the world religions elective. This summer has been a very enlightening one for the lucky students in "Holy Cow! World Religions and New Haven." We started off the summer by learning about religious symbols and their origins. We made matzo pizzas and challah while learning about Judaism, while co-teacher Edie Joseph told us about the significance of these foods in the Jewish tradition. Then we learned about Christianity as the students participated in a treasure hunt all over Old Campus, piecing together a timeline of Christian history from the birth of Christ up until the present. The following week, the class was lucky enough to receive a visit from Omer Bajwa, the Muslim chaplain at Yale. Mr. Bajwa gave us an interesting and informative lecture about the tenets of the Muslim faith and led us in some Muslim daily prayers for students who wanted to participate. We also had a visit from the Yale University Chaplain, Sharon Kugler, who told us about what it was like to be religious at Yale and gave us delicious popsicles. The following week, we debated the role of religion and prayer in schools a class. We also had a day where we visited the library so that the students could do independent research about the religion of their choice, and then present what they had learned to the class. 

Today, however, we received a very special visit from a Yale student named Chelsea Allen who is one of five Baha'i undergraduates at Yale. She is very involved with her faith and she gave us an excellent introduction to the Baha'i faith, teachings, and history. To learn more about the Baha'i faith, you can visit the Baha'i official website at www.bahai.org. The students seemed to really respond to Chelsea, who taught them a song set to a Baha'i prayer. We recorded the students singing the song, but I am having some trouble loading it onto the blog. Once I figure that out, I will put it up here. So stay posted!