Planting Flowers in Homeschool

Alhamdulilah spring is in the air, and we are teaching the children about flowers. What makes flowers grow, and what is needed.

The children were excited because we went a different route, we paper mache dish detergent bottles and made them into planting pots for our indoor garden.

 

We cut the dish detergent bottle in half…added holes at the bottom and the children paper mache them, then painted them. The next day we planted our flowers in them.

It was pretty fun to do.

 

The children planted wild flowers, basil, radishes, and dill.

 

Not in the same containers though 🙂 this was just one set that we finished.  What you can discuss with your children about this is the fact that Allah created everything and He is known as Al Khaliq- The Creator… this is a good way to teach the children one of the names of Allah and also explaining that it is Allah Who provides us with the herbs that we grow..to feed us and the flowers and trees.

Allah’s creation is so beautiful and we should take care of it, by never throwing trash on the ground, recycling, and doing our part no matter how big or small to take care of what Allah has given us 🙂

 

Journal Writing and Letter Writing In Homeschool

It has been awhile since I have updated the blog!

MashaAllah there is so much going on, but there are many updates to share.

My four year old son has been writing a lot, for awhile now. He just recently began showing interest in writing letters and putting them in an envelope.  Well he had no one to mail them to! I decided that this would be a good time for him to get a penpal. Not only are we at a time where is emailing and texting, but when was the last time you wrote a letter, and bought a stamp? I want my children to experience the joys of letter writing, as I intend on scrap booking it, so he can see it as he grows up and it also helps me to see how much his writing has improved!

Also we started a few months back the Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons Book. Sent to us by my dear friend at Homeschooling Muslimah Mommies. While my son has been reading since two alhamdulilah..I actually use the book to reinforce and make his reading stronger mashaAllah..the book is to help children read at a second grade level upon completion. We love the book, we are flying through it and I like that at the end it has SOUND writing, so it just adds extra practice to his writing. He even has his own journal, which I date every time we use it and what lesson we stopped on.

A few tips and advice from our family. To get the children excited about writing, we let them pick their own pencils, books, crayons etc ..so they hcan have their own person writing station

We also bought several books, a few of them to doodle in, practice writing, and have fun with and a few on the side only used for homeschool purposes. This does not confuse our children, it actually helps them practice. Our oldest son took his journal on the train and would write in it until we got to our stop.

I am very certain he will enjoy his new penpal adventure. We will be starting our first letter today inshaAllah and it will be good to practic his writing, spelling, and appreciate the joys of getting mail. I LOVE to get mail mashaAllah!

What are you doing to encourage your child’s writing? 🙂

 

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.–Anne Rice

Body Measurements

We had a Peter Pan moment where the boys enjoyed the body cutouts for about a hour, before we actually used them to measure items around the house.   

We simply used cardboard boxes, the boys laid on them and we traced their body on it and cut it out.

 

We made number cards on index cards to mark the spots on the wall so we could easily keep count

 

You can use the body cutouts to label body parts as well, it’s a great visual aid but the main thing is that it is personal because its them and so the children obviously named their cutouts after themselves: Takbir and Tasbeeh

 

 

 

Tomorrow inshaAllah we will use them for body parts, more measurements and play time 🙂

The Week Of Worms..So Far

The first two days or worms we worked on our worm word wall and learned some really great facts about the worm

We learn about how many hearts a worm has and how they have no teeth

The second day we are working on the anatomy of a worm, and more facts. We are introducing new vocabulary words from the word wall in all the lessons this week. Here are our two projects so far!

Our words come from the Dolch list for preschool and first grade.

Then we made cereal worms to begin our intro the anatomy of a worm

We simply allowed  the children to glue the cereal on the paper and make a cereal tree

 

InshaAllah later we will go on a worm hunt!

 

DIY- Literacy Fun: Popout Book

We made the boys a count and find pop out book. It was fun and easy to make. We called this book “We Like Animals”  it is the story of three different animals and they are looking for something in the story. 

 

The first is a dinosaur he is looking for his orange ball

The second is a bear and he is looking for three trees

The last is a butterfly and he is looking for a big flower.  This DIY book had the boys find the items and count, also name colors and the animals they were looking at.

You can make this by doing the follow: 

 

Get a construction paper and fold it in half..cut two slits about an inch apart and then push the square inbetween the slits inside the fold. It should look like a box inside when you open it, and then you glue whatever object you want on it and around it

Put lines on the paper and write a story afterwards we taped them all together and then put one final layer of construction paper on top. Ta da!!