MAR Book 1, Lesson 1: "This is a..."

Our first formal lessons in learning Arabic... Decided to use the Madinah Arabic Reader series as I've already gone through the first few chapters myself in the past - just bought the Reader version as it's a bit more accessible for children (in that the layout is nicer to look at and there are colour pictures; the content is exactly the same).

I'm using the book as a guideline - we'll go through it in order but we'll be doing the work mainly verbally as opposed to written and I'll adapt the lessons into activities for the kids... We'll cover most of the vocabulary but as the book is aimed at older ages we'll only briefly go over the words which aren't really relevant/difficult for home educating 4 year olds to understand (e.g. "university", "student", "headteacher", etc.!)

So the first lesson begins with هَذَا (this is) and introduces some common nouns, most of which are easily found around the house. Before even showing the book to the girls, I decided to run through this vocab with them by taking them round the house and saying the sentences on the first page for them to repeat. After a few rounds of repetition we continued to the next concept on page 2, turning the phrases into questions: مَا هَذَا؟ (what is this?) and أَهَذَا ... ؟ (is this ... ?). So I would point at e.g. the door and ask either, "What is this?" or "Is this a door?" and have the girls reply in sentences, e.g. "Yes, this is a door." or "No, this is a pen." This took a maximum of 10 minutes to do and I wasn't fussed if they made mistakes - it was all very playful, in silly voices, moving around - if they made a mistake, I'd just say what it was supposed to be for them to repeat. No pressure. And they enjoyed the questioning part since the questions were so ridiculous (really, Mama, you're asking if a pen is a door?? 😂) and I kept the timing short on purpose so it wouldn't get boring or tedious.

I then wrote the 9 words on page 1 onto our whiteboard by drawing a picture in one colour and writing the transliterated Arabic underneath in another. In hindsight, next time I'd include the actual Arabic too even if they can't read it just for exposure. We revisited the board over the next couple of days then read through up to the top of page 7 together, translating as we went along. For the exercise on page 7 we didn't do any writing; I just said the sentence in either English or Arabic and the girls needed to translate it into the other language. The next day, we did some simple flashcard activities where I held up a picture for them to translate or I pointed at one from a selection and they needed to ask a question. Since then, we just substituted the Arabic words into our everyday life wherever we could, regardless of whether the grammar made sense or not - it was more for vocab practice. e.g. "Can you open the baabun for me?" (Don't worry about the grammar as this is easily corrected as you progress through the lessons!)


The mini flashcards I made for Chapters 1-4 can be downloaded here. Black and white, for the option for the kids to colour them themselves while revising vocab. I printed then laminated mine and colour coded the borders: red = m. nouns, pink = f. nouns, blue = adjectives, yellow = prepositions, green = other. Verbs haven't been introduced in the book yet.