INSPIRATION

Assalamo aleykum.

I decided to homeschool with little or no knowledge of the various homeschooling philosophies and approaches out there. However, in this post I would like to briefly share one I have recently been reading about that has really sparked my interest: Project Based Homeschooling (PBH).

Jazaki Allahu khayran to the sister that sent me the link to the Project Based Homeschooling website.

In a nutshell, PBH means that the child must be in charge of what he learns and how he learns it.

The beauty of this approach is that it can co-exist with whatever homeschooling method one follows, as it doesn't necessarily have to be applied to everything a child learns and it is not a purist, in-or-out approach with a ret of rigid rules that must be applied. I find this aspect rather liberating, alhamdulillah.

As a novice to homeschooling, I often put "productivity" as a priority. PBH reminded me that we are not homeschooling to "go through" a program. It helped me re-gain focus on what is the true kind of learning, the one that will last, insha'Allah.

When talking about project-based homeschooling, we are moving beyond knowledge and skills and probing underneath for the machinery of learning. 

(Lori Pickert, "Project-Based Homeschooling")

 I always tended to cringe when my children "messed about" with materials, instead of using them for the purpose I had in mind. What I was failing to remember - and PBH is very strong about - is that the exploration of the materials is a vital part of learning.

A practical example. Yusef (5) loves to write. He can't get enough of it. By "writing" I mean to fill whole pages of his many diaries and notebooks with letters, very tightly packed together. Random letters. If you look carefully at one of such pages, you are likely to find some actual words in them (typically "Yusef, Bilal, mummy, abi, Allah..."). Once I used to ask him why he didn't write actual words and sentences. I have now learnt that this is the way Yusef is making himself into a writer, and I respect it. He also writes actual words and sentences in other activities and sometimes spontaneously, so I know he is capable of it.

PBH emphasises the importance of a certain topic being explored time and time again, rather than being a box that we hasten to tick to move on to the next one. A child should be free to delve into his chosen object of study in depth and to return to it. Every time he will increase his understanding and enrich his learning experience. Every time he will produce more and more sophisticated representations, to go hand in hand with the greater degree of his mastery of the topic he is learning about.

I strongly recommend Lori Pickert's book. It is a wonderful read (you may want to underline nearly everything...) N.B. As this is a non-Muslim author, my recommendation of her work is limited to her ideas in the education of children and specifically to what in no way conflicts with the teaching of Islam, which are the primary and only indispensable source of guidance for every Muslim homeschooler.

What every homeschooler dreads to hear....

Yes, you've guessed it, it's:

"Mummy, I want to go to school..."

Assalamo aleykum.

I haven't been updating this blog for a very long time, mostly because I have been too (disorganisedly) busy.

About two weeks ago, while re-organising the children's bookshelf, we stumbled across a folder that was given to us by the Islamic preschool Yusef attended for a year before we moved city. He started flicking through it's pages, where samples of his work were kept with some pictures of him doing it (back then we hadn't a ban on pictures, astaghfirullah) and rather impersonal comments written; while I was thinking of how basic and uninspiring it all seemed compared to homeschooling, Yusef started to longingly caress the pages, looking increasingly depressed.
He said he knew the old school was for small children, but now that he was a big boy we should try a big boy school.

I felt crushed.

I tried to hide my tears as I was washing the dishes.

As soon as I felt like I could hold back I went to him and promised that insha'Allah we would do such wonderful things together that he won't miss school anymore.

May Allah guide me and help me honour this promise.

As a matter of fact I had been slacking and had gone completely off the track homeschooling-wise. But - alhamdulillah - thanks to some lovely fellow homeschoolers (Jazahum Allahu khayran), inspiration was just around the corner...

Books about Farms

Assalamo aleykum, these are the two main books we based our farm lapbook on.

 

^^ Yusef loves this book and he has wanted to have it read at bedtime almost every evening for the past month!
It is a nice book in the sense that each double page has exactly the same image, but the view changes according to the time of the year.  Some of the walls of buildings are taken out to reveal what is going on inside. It doesn't speak only about strictly agricultural activities (there's sport contests, visitors and even an archeological escavation taking place).
On the side of each double page there are pictures of a few items to find in the bigger picture, and here comes the criticism: This book features symbols of celebrations all Muslims should steer well clear from (i.e. Halloween and Christmas). In the October page you have to look for the jack-o-lantern and in December for the Christmas tree.The text in the December page mentions that "Christmas is coming soon", while in July there's a Summer fair with a band playing and people dancing,both in the picture and described in the text.

As my son cannot read everything by himself yet, I have simply skipped the relevant parts in the story telling and the pictures can easily be blocked out with a sticker (some are so small that a pencil will do the trick).

A smaller criticism is that there are fewer pages than there are months, i.e. there's a page for January, March, April, June, July, August, then October and December.

Other than this (which is understandable as it is a book written by a non Muslim author), it is a lovely book and the images offer plenty of topics for further discussion.

 

^^ I really like this book, particularly, I love the style of the illustrations. If I remember correctly it is from the 70s. Thanks to it Yusef has learned the names and sequence of the months of the gregorian calendar (there's a double page for every month, plus they are listed on the lovely cover).

As far as I can remember there's no mention, or representation, of festivities in this book. Hurray! It had large images and a very manageable amount of text for an early reader that is looking forward to turn the page.

The FARM phase (and big farm lapbook)

Assalamo aleykum,

Yusef has been through (and I cannot yet say he's out it) a phase of great love and interest in farms. From farm machinery, to animals, to agricolture.

Originally I wanted to teach him about seasons, but he got this playmobil catalogue and he really loved looking at the playmobil farm and started asking question and wanting to talk about farms all the time.

I got him a couple of books on the topic and I started the -frankly, quite lengthy and un-focussed - process of trying to make this a coherent project *slaps own forehead* We did do A LOT of talking, reading, cutting, playing, colouring, writing, etc. about everything and anything FARM.

Coherent or not, here's the result: the MEGA lapbook (a much larger than normal Amazon box!). And Yusef is dead proud of it, always desperately trying to fit it into the scope of the camera when we are on skype with our families abroad *thumbs up*

The whole thing (front, flaps unopened):

Here's a little "tafseer" activity about Surah Quraysh.

 I chose this surah because it is the only one where some names of seasons are mentioned. This activity would have belonged much more in a lapbook about seasons, but I had it ready and really wanted to use it, to be honest. It could be made into a matching card game (I didn't because I had already made one in this lapbook), so I just asked Yusef to identify (with help!) and colour the words for seasons in the Arabic text of the surah, and to match a picture to the translation of each ayah. You can download this activity here.

Along the bottom of the entire lapbook, we represented the growth cycle of wheat. We printed out a free grid calendar (I don't remember from where but they are easily available online), we cut the months and disposed them accordingly. We used real seeds (eating a lot of them in the meantime), wool and pipecleaners to represent respectively the little green plants and the ears of wheat.

In the middle section we used some mini books from Enchanted Learning, the "Bestiame (livestock) barn book"   to learn the names of some animals in Italian (the same is available in English and other languages) and Farm cut-and-paste mini dictionary. Both of them include a page for the pig, which I haven't included in the rest of the lapbook. I thought it would be useful for Yusef to be introduced to the Italian term for it (so that he can say he cannot eat it when we are in Italy) and in general to know that some animals we eat and some we don't, so I left it in, but we wrote on top that it is haraam:

Also in the middle section, I used an envelope to contain the Farming machinery matching game

 

^^I finally got to use my laminator for the first time (and felt like a real home educator!!!!). Insha'Allah you can download the words here and the corresponding pictures here.

The section on the right has some simple farm related copywork I made, since Yusef is showing a lot of interest in writing letters/words:

They can be downloaded here: farm copywork , Animals homes pictures , Animals home copywork

Now my favorite part is the one under the flaps: the farming machine one! (I usually don't care much for this kind of things but finding out about the combine harvester was quite interesting masha'Allah).

 

Here are the files for the tractor activity:Parts of a tractor and Parts of a tractor labels.

For the combine harvester we made a 3 pages lift-the-flap book called Inside a combine harvester.

 I found online a lovely picture of a combine harvester that also showed the inside and some small pictures of the most important components. I printed 3 copies of the same file and glued each on a piece of red card. I chose the parts of the machine I wanted to include in the "study" (;)) and cut slits to open a flap on that part. I cut 2 of these windows for each page, starting from the front of the machine, to describe the journey of the wheat inside it. Then I simply used patches of paper glued at the back of each page to close the window and on the paper we stuck the little round picture of the relevant part of the machine, together with 1 word that described its function. I used a tracing font and very short words that Yusef could read (almost) by himself, like "COMB", "CUT", "BEAT", "GO UP", "SIEVE" etc. so he could gain some understanding of how the wheat goes in whole and comes out in grains!

The inside of the flaps were decorated entirely by Yusef with pictures he cut from the little free magazine from Asda (it always comes in handy to cut up!)

 

 

On the back of each sides we talked respectively about seasonal produce and activities related to farm animals that (according to the books we read) take place at certain times of the year.

 

 

^^ For this activity I drew my own graphics, which insha'Allah I will post in a separate post. Here's the file for the Colour coded names of the months  (different colours according to the season they fall in)



^^ We had 4 baskets, one for each of the seasons, and a lot of pictures of fruit and vegetable, each with a little coloured square that represented its peak season. A lot of cutting and gluing later, we could see which season "won" with the tallest fruit pile, masha'Allah. here you can download the Fruit and vegetable activity.  Seasons baskets

Alhamdulillah I found a treasure

Assalamo aleykum,

My husband half rolled his eyes and half thought I was cute.

A few weeks ago, my neighbours had the very bad idea of having this huge and beautiful (and perfectly healthy) evergreen tree that was very close to the fence between us cut down. They had a couple of "reasons" but we are pretty sure the family of squirrels living in it have a lot to do with it... they did create some mess in our garden too (and stole a few of our tomatoes from the plant!) but it was such a joy for us and the children to look at them going about their daily business through our french doors...

...anyway, the tree had to be pulled down in our garden, and a few days ago, while playing outside with my little one, I discovered that the "tree assassins" (sorry, I know it's just their job, but I am resentful) left behind a few pieces of wood, which I collected with the intention to make them into something the kids could enjoy. If they are few and to oddly shaped to be regarded as building blocks, they sure offer great sensory stimulation (the wood is still so fresh and the bigger pieces still smell strongly of evergreen tree).

My stash, after spending about 2 weeks under the snow!

 

 

After keeping them for 3 days near the radiator to dry them, last night I could finally sand them. I'm proud to say I managed to salvage almost all of them.

 



Yusef was happy to finally be allowed to touch the "woods" he had seen around for a while. Bilal immediately grabbed the big chunk, rubbed it over his lips, sort of kissed it and gave it a big sniff.

 

 

I wanted to find out some info on how to make wood safe for toddlers to handle, so I ended up reading about natural wooden blocks, what they do for the senses, how they are non-directional toys etc... I am really not surprised about any of this. Just like I am not surprised about the fact we were all playing with the wood this morning, myself and Abu Yusef included, so much so that we almost forgot breakfast.

 

 

This is Allah's creation before it gets messed with: an absolute delight. A good little reminder to us all, and also a way to keep that tree we all loved so much part of the family :) (shame I don't have a picture that shows just how tall it was...)

My 2 sons and dishes

Assalamo aleykum,

This week both my sons have taken up some activity that involves plates. Alhamdulillah.

Yusef is nearly 5, and here he is doing his very first load of washing up: (I know I should have started him on it ages ago, I was lazy I admit it...)

My "baby" on the other hand, who is 19 months old, this week has realised he can reach the kitchen worktop (just the edge, but that's enough to pull stuff down) AND he has learned to climb onto dining chairs. Here's some casualties of his achievement masha'Allah:

 

 I had bought that glass that very same day, Qadr Allah!

 

I have decided that I will keep the biggest bits on broken plates and glasses until we have enough to make something with them.... I'm thinking Gaudi, Parc Guell (Barcelona)

 

 

You think that's ambitious? Never underestimate the amount of stuff your kids can break ;)



Snow

Assalamo aleykum,
a couple of weeks ago we had quite a lot of snow here in Leicester.
Now, it must be said that the mere prospect of snow transform me from a 30-something year old that should be worrying about the disruption and inconveniences that "bad" weather might cause, to a young child, excited enough to keep giggling and clapping her hands to herself. And no, I don't care who sees.

Yusef and I were doing du3a' for snow because we were studying the seasons and everywhere winter is characterised by snow, and we really wanted to see that happen... in His great mercy, Allah granted us what we wanted. [This was a golden occasion to explain to him about Allah sending the rain/snow exactly where He wants, and giving this job to a particular angel...]

Here's Yusef's first, and quite distinctly Muslim, snowman (and also Abu Yusef's first = man of the desert, masha'Allah):

^^This was only the very first snow. We had much more alhamdulillah. So I looked for some snow themed crafts easy enough for a 4 year old. This is what I decided to try:

These really simple but fun lolly sticks and buttons snowflakes from Handmade Beginnings (here's our attempt):

 

 

Then we had a go at these Pipe cleaner snowflakes (by Martha Stewart). I must admit this were completely lost on Yusef, who only wanted to collect the pipe cleaners in his hand, feel them and comment on their colours and he only accepted to help me here and there. Fair enough.

 

That evening I sat on the living room on a carpet of colourful pipe cleaners - that my boys were picking up and collecting in bunches as though they were flowers - making snowflakes. Good times alhamdulillah.