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.