3rd class

Today was an interesting day. The school had a swimming pool day, so many of the kids did not came to class, particularly in the older group.

The meditation was metta (loving kindness). We focused on the breath during the whole session. Sending love when we breath in, and then feeling the air coming out through the nostrils when we breath out. When breathing in, we think about someone we love, trying to visualize the person. When we breath out we just focus on the breath coming out through the nostrils.

The younger k-2 kids were terrible. It was partially my fault. I did not hand out their notebooks at the beginning of the class, when I was passing role, and then it was too late. We did about 10 minutes of sitting, but too many were too distracted. Then I tried to spend some time reviewing Buddhas life, but by then it was hard to get the attention of half of the class....
What I've learned: The little ones need to be more busy. Being busy keeps the discipline under control. The 30 minutes is actually all they can handle for this type of activity (or inactivity I should say).
Despite the problems some kids must have done better than I thought. One of the girls seemed sad when we finished the class, and one of her friends was hugging her. I asked her what was wrong and she said she had not been able to see her grandfather. The grandfather had died recently, and I now think she meant during the visualization exercise... This means he tried hard, and it teaches me I should mention that this might happen and its alright.

All the bad luck of the work in the first group, was compensated with the great results in the older kids group. There were about 10 kids. Two of them kept making noise in the first 5 min of the sitting, moving around, etc. So I send them to the office. It was very obvious that the other ones were very ready to sit and do it properly, so it would have been unfair to leave them there. Everything was perfect afterwards.

One of the girls actually sat for most of the 30 min. Poor things, I could tell she was in pain. First her legs (she was in full lotus!), then everything.. her teeth grinding, but she kept going.
I asked those that felt in pain to change positions if they needed to, but she wanted to keep still!