All Mankind...

“Let your acts be a guide unto all mankind… It is through your deeds that ye can distinguish yourselves from others. Through them the brightness of your light can be shed upon the whole earth.” –Bahá’u’lláh

After focusing on the concepts of being a light and being a guide, we studied the concept of "mankind". I was actually going to keep this lesson very short and sweet because I assumed the children knew what mankind meant, but we ended up looking at the concept over two class sessions.

For the first lesson, we read


This is a children's book looking at the diversity among people, cultures and ways of living and being around the world. Looking back, I wish I had encouraged more discussion by the children about the different illustrations. It's interesting to hear their perceptions and perspectives, and I think they would have absorbed the content better, too. So as I write this, I'm making a mental note to be sure I bring the book out again at a future story time and take our time with it!

Our second activity was putting together a collage with images of different kinds of people. My magazine selection is somewhat limited, but I encouraged the kids to try to find images of as many different kinds of people with different kinds of features as they could -- different skin colors, hair types, ages, genders, clothing.


We also discussed how mankind doesn't only refer to people "out there" in other countries and far away places, but to our own communities and people we know and love. Being guides and lights to our families, friends and teachers is serving mankind, too. We didn't have pictures of our relatives or friends, (although that could be a nice addition), so we simply wrote down the different people we see in our lives everyday and added them.

Other reads...

There are a couple of other young children's books that come to mind on the subject of mankind. (Sorry, you can't actually "click to look inside", but you can find them at Amazon.com along with "People".)



And this is a GREAT read for grown-ups:


A fantastic resource to have for your personal library -- well-written and chock full of ideas and activities on raising world citizens. It's baby-shower, first-birthday-gift good.

And one more little craft idea...

Another I thought of on this theme was creating a string of paper dolls.


The children can be encouraged to color them different skin colors and create faces with different types of eyes, ears and noses. They can color or cut and paste different hair styles and also different types of clothing and costumes.

If you want to take the craft a little further, (and you'd need to do this over several days or weekly lessons because of all the drying time required), the children could collectively or individually make a paper mache globe of the earth and glue the chain of multicultural paper dolls around it.