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

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.

 

Squares and Rectangles lapbook

Assalamo aleykum,

Alhamdulillah we managed to wrap up some nice activities about squares and rectangles. I had originally thought of having a lapbook about quadrilaterals (with trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms too) but there wasn't going to be enough space to explore the difference between all of those shapes. So we stuck with the easier ones for the time being. It is very similar to our Triangles Lapbook, and again it all started with an Amazon box I had received a book in (alhamdulillah for saving them!):

 

 

The colour scheme is a little out there ... eh eh. Anyway, the first part is a collection of some creative bits and bobs: Yusef cut out and coloured his own cardboard shapes (and made some holes in them so they could breathe... bless him!) and then we built a robot using squares and rectangles (the base of the robot was one we had left from this build your own robot craft kit, but it can easily be recreated).

 

On the middle section we built the shapes with cut drinking straws, the straight parts for sides and the bendy bits to make angles, and we made a little flap inside each shapes under which we hid the answer to the questions:

 

 

 

(^^In the middle of the assembly work, Yusef decided he had to spell my name with sticky letters, so I included in the lapbook. Apparently my name is "Mommi", see above, bottom right <3 masha'Allah)

 

The third part is the one that is full of surprises. On the outer part of the horizontal flaps we stuck 3 minibook we had made, 2 of them are collections of geometrical puzzles - intended for much older people - but that I use to let Yusef practise his ability to identify the shapes (those that are more apparent of course) and to count them, within his ability of course:

 

 

 Unlike the similar minibook we made about triangles,most of these puzzles each featured more than one kind of shape, s he had to be careful to colour only the one that was relevant to the exercise:

 

 

 

The 3rd minibook features pictures of objects that can be either square or rectangular, labelled with the object name that Yusef traced, masha'Allah. I do realise all objects are 3D, so I tried to choose flat things, to make it less obvious to a 4 year old:

 

 

Under the flaps, we practised some "measuring in non conventional units". I simply printed out some grid paper (medium and large from here ) on white and coloured paper and drew some shapes for Yusef to fill in with squares, cut from coloured paper. He then counted how many squares were needed to make each shape and wrote the numbers. (Barak Allahu feek to Aisha, my sister in Islam and "home educator extraordinaire" - masha'Allah - for telling me about non conventional units of measure!!!... I had no idea)

 

 

During a recent conversation with my (birth) sister, I was reminded about PATTERNS and though "We haven't done patters in ages!!!" so we devoted the last bits of space left (under the horizontal flaps) to patters, made with squares cut out of the leftover card we had used:

 

 

 

This was good fun alhamdulillah :)

 

Everything can easily be found online/reproduced, however, if you want to save time, here is what I used (they are NOT looking very professional, please bear with me...):

 

How many rectangles can you see?

How many squares can you see?

Same object rectangular and square

Various labels (including blank speech bubbles to add to the finished work the best quotes from your child as he/she was making it)

 

 

Our first lapbook is finished! alhamdulillah

Assalamo aleykum,

Since researching a little about lapbooking, I have been really really excited about it. It seemed like a very interactive and very creative way to collect the various bits and bobs we would otherwise do and consolidate learning.

Let alone that it is totally up my street, craft-wise...*emanates hearts*

Given that I am still playing it by ear and that Yusef seems obsessed with shapes lately, I decided we'll start with a lapbook on triangles. It seemed like an obvious choice since it is the shape with the least sides.

Now this may seem an ordinary Amazon box to you...

But once opened...TA DAAAA!!!!

 

First thing first: I printed off 2 A4 sheets of (large triangle) isometric paper from here to work as background, you could print more and cover the whole thing, but I wanted to leave some white.

 

Then we started off counting sides and angles of the shape. Not a problem for Yusef since we have just introduced polygons masha'Allah... but how to represent it? We chose to cut up drinking straws and pick 3 straight segments to demonstrate the number of sides, and 3 of the bendy bits to represent the three angles:

 

 

Then we went on to speak about the different kinds of triangles. After thinking of the possible ways to categorise them, I decided to just do so according to their sides (and not angles) so we made 3 flaps, for equilateral, isosceles and scalene triangles. I let Yusef trace the adjectives and place them on the outside of the flaps, as well as an example of each triangle.

 

 

We used sticky starts to mark the sides that are the same. Inside he traced the definition of each kind of triangle (I also put it in print, for clarity's sake, as he can get carried away with the tracing and make it a little "obscure" masha'Allah). We added a few example of each.

 

The pictures of triangles are from math-salamanders.com (each printable also come in b/w for the child to colour, personally I thought Yusef already had enough colouring in, as you will soon see...).

 

The 2 orizontal flaps (on the right side of the box) were covered with green paper (since the isometric grid we printed was - randomly - green, I chose that as main colour). On the ouside of the lower flap, we stuck the mini book we made about triangle road signs.

 

I simply collected pictures of triangle road signs from the internet and wrote a simple description for Yusef to match. I picked signs that are quite self explanatory. If you want, I can spare you the search, here they are: Triangular road sign activity minibook

 

On the top flap we stuck a pocket (not a proper lapbook pocket, but an empty pack of blue-tack covered in green paper! ... I had lovely templates, but my printer didn't take the cardstock I have and I was impatient ...).

 

The pocket contains some really great colouring job Yusef did over the last couple of days, identifying all the triangles in the shapes I found online by googling "How many triangles can you see?"

 

 



I cut the pictures and mounted them on some cards, punched a whole (or a few, in some cases...oops!) and we secured them with some string. The pictures to colour in are here: How many triangles can you see? you could make into a minibook too.

Inside the flaps it's a collection of pictures of triangular things. Again, from the internet. I also printed labels in a tracing font for Yusef to trace the names of the objects. There's a lot of flying things, because he is very much into planes and similar things at the moment. Here are most of the pictures I used: Pictures of triangular things

Here we also included a minibook (the hexagonal one above) taken from Enchanted Learning, but instead of drawing the items mentioned (Yusef is not much for drawing), we cut out pictures.

(By the way, NEVER google an image with the word "underwear"... seriously, what immediately popped out was enough to turn my stomach...I might be naive but also people are sick out there!!!)

Here is our lapbook, we really enjoyed making it, although Yusef saw all the bits and pieces together so one second he was tracing, then the next he was colouring in and after another 2 seconds he was cutting...lol. I'll make sure I hid the material next time! Insha'Allah we'll make one also for other categories of shapes... watch this space!