Prophet Ibraheem (AS) - 01 - What are idols?

The girls were already aware of the Prophet Ibraheem (AS) from some of their story books and our discussions and activities about Hajj (he's mentioned in the 5 Pillars song I wrote earlier!) but I wanted to go through his story in a little more depth as part of their Reception targets. I decided to start with Prophet Ibraheem (AS) rather than Prophet Adam (AS) for the very reason they were already a little familiar with him.

We read the beginning of the chapter about Prophet Ibraheem (AS) in the Migo & Ali book (pages 23-25). This part of the story introduces who he is as a prophet and explains the people at the time used to pray to idols.

As the concept of idols was new to the girls, I decided to use this as an opportunity to make and play with play dough: after incorporating numeracy skills (measuring, counting, etc.) into making the dough they could then play with it (making shapes and rolling it out etc. NOT with the intention of making idols!!) and after a while we could discuss the idea of praying to something we've made with our own hands - of course, the idea of it doesn't make sense to us. Allah made us and made everything... We can't even imagine what He looks like! So making and worshiping idols as gods is surely wrong. After a little discussion the girls continued playing, probably for nearly an hour in total! So the point was subtly mentioned while they were having fun rather than laboured over.

I used the playdough recipe from The Imagination Tree. We found we needed to add a touch more flour than stated, but otherwise the dough is perfect and keeps really well.