Week 4-Allah created people

Alhamdulillah I am finally able to write down our week four activities done in two weeks ago. Our topic was “Allah created people.” We did not go in depth. We just talked about things according to her level of comprehension. We read about different countries and flags from National Geographic  KIDS ALMANAC.

She showed me some flags and asked me which countries’ flags those are. We selected few countries to be discussed a little detail. We talked about where she was born, where we are living now, and where her grandparents live. She knows that she can go to Canada by car but she needs a plane ride to go to grandparents.  We taped a world map on the wall and showed her all four countries we learnt about. 

Here are some pages from this week mini book "Allah created animals and birds". You can download it here. RA started coloring it before I made the book. As we can see she also set up a new place for coloring. I put national geographic Almanac in front of her and she said that she is pretending it is giving her instruction how to color the map in her mini book :)

 Some other pages from the book..

We cut and pasted some pictures of children from different countries.

 We took Saudi Arabia for our country study. She talked about this country, about kaaba , about zamzam well and hajj. We have already read the story of zamzam well.

We read the book about jobs which I printed from Arabic first.

 Alhamdulillah she learnt about different types of jobs. Now she knows that the man who comes to our house to work with sink is called plumber and abbu goes to a barber to have cut his hair. She was pretending to be a builder and built a house with her blocks. We watched this YouTube video about different jobs for people. It was quite helpful.

Arabic letters:

She was not very interested in coloring or learning new Arabic letters. So she colored the Arabic letters she has already learnt in her book. We played a game with her puzzle. I was asking her to find the letters and put them in their right places while I was counting ten. She liked it so much and was happy to find all the letters long before I counted to ten.

We read the Aqeeda book and talked about muslim and kafir, who would go to jannah and jahannam, respectively, and what would they get there as a reward or as a punishments. MashaAllah she understood that one is the best place to go and other is the worst place to end up with. We made a little doa so that we all can go to Jannah. Surprisingly I got some book about Islam in our library. Some of the pictures and contents are not proper Islamic, so I skipped that part and read the other parts.

Story of prophets:

We are still waiting for nanumoni to send us the books about Prophets. In the mean time we read about Adam (pbuh) online. You can find the book ‘Stories of Prophets’ by Ibn Kathir online. And we watched this powerpoint presentation.

Asmaul husnah:

We learnt two beautiful names of Allah swt- “Al –Aziz” and “Al-Alim”.

 I told her Allah is Al-Mighty, all powerful. He can do anything. He is so mighty he controls the whole universe. Nobody has power to do any harm to you if Allah does not want. Again nobody can do any good to you without the permission of Allah. So when you need help ask Allah. I told her only Allah knows everything. Only He knows what we are doing right now and what we will do tomorrow. I asked her few questions. It goes like this

Do you know everything?-No

Do you know what your counsins are doing in another country?-No

Do you know what the birds are eating? What fishes are eating under the sea?-No

Who knows? - Allah.  Allah knows everything about everybody. Allah knows even what you are thinking. 

And here are some dialogues from her monologue

 Does anybody know if I tear tissue paper? –no.

 Who knows?- Allah knows

Does anybody know if I will jump or not?-no

Who knows?

Allah knows. Allah is Al-Aziz (she confused it with Al-Alim, but Alhamdulillah I am happy at least she understood what I wanted to say. Sometimes we think children will not understand so let’s not tell them about different aspects of deen at this young age. Of course I am not talking about difficult and hard things which they really don’t understand). Just to give an example, other day I told her that we don’t draw human face, feeling that may be she was too little to understand that. But to my surprise she kept it in mind and reminded me to cut off the faces from the printed pictures of children from different countries which we pasted this week mini book.

Surah memorization

Alhamdulillah RA finished surah ikhlas. We read the explanations from here. We just skimmed through it, not explained elaborately. This is another website which I found quite helpful when it comes to memorization. You can choose a surah and also chose how many times you want it to be repeated or how many times you want every single verse to be repeated. Our strategy was to play that surah online while she was playing with her blocks or other things; we found she repeated the verses even without noticing. Generally, RA does not want to repeat what I say. Other day somebody told me, “don’t want her to repeat all the time, you just recite it yourself and eventually they will learn it”. It really does work, Alhamdulillah.

Dua of the week:

We learnt this small dua “Rabbi zidnee ‘ilma”( o my Lord, increase me in knowledge) (taaha:114).

Little helper in the kitchen:

We baked some chocolate chip cookies this week. Kids love cookies. Well I love cookies too. But I hate to buy cookies with so many ingredients. So why not make our own cookie? RA was quite interested in playing with flour and eating chocolate chips. Still she helped a little by pouring flour and sugar in the bowl and mixing them.

 She did help a lot by accompanying me of course J. She was busy with flour and suddenly she said, “Ammu, You forgot to say Bismillah”. Yes I did forget to say it loudly. I told her I am so happy that she reminded me. And Allah will reward her when she reminds people.  Her immediate response was “Will Allah give me sticker?”  “Yes Allah will, through us.”

We also had a tea party with our stuffed animals. you can't see her other stuffed animals because they didn't agree to sit on a shared chair. RA put a tissue paper in front of her sick bunny, in case she needed that for her runny nose. :) i found her asking her bunny, " are you feeling yummy in your tummy?"

This week math and literacy update is here.