99 Names of Allah - 06 - As-Salaam - The Source of Peace/The Flawless

[06] اَلسَّلَامُ (As-Salaam): The Source of Peace/The Flawless

[Download resources here]

Sing 99 Names (5min)

Play PowerPoint of the first 33 names, 2-3 times. Sing together and do the actions so far plus:

Action for As-Salaam: Hold hands with yourself and shake hands, as if giving salaam.

Today’s focus is on the name As-Salaam which means The Source of Peace/The Flawless.

Story relating to today's name (7min)

Read a short story to the children relating to peace and quiet, e.g. Five Minutes' Peace, I'm Not Reading, etc. or to do with friends falling out then reconciling, e.g. It's Mine!, Pip & Posy: The Snowy Day, etc. - or both! Discuss the morals of the stories and how the characters felt when they weren't at peace, i.e. they weren't happy, they weren't comfortable, they wanted peace/to be friends again, etc.

Discuss meaning, apply to children's lives (15min)

As-Salaam can mean two things: The Source of Peace or The Flawless. Do you know what "flawless" means? If something has a flaw, it means it has something wrong with it; it isn't perfect. e.g. show children a perfectly flat piece of paper (Post-It note size is fine) - it's flawless. Then put a small rip in one of the edges and tear a corner off. Is it still flawless? Draw some seemingly random dots and marks on the paper. How many flaws does the paper have now? Join the dots and marks together to make e.g. a flower. Are the flaws still flaws? Even if we can't make all our flaws disappear, we can always work hard on making them less of a flaw and focus more on our good points instead.

Flaws don't have to be just physical things, or things we can see. They could be to do with our personality or actions. Together, look at sheet of statements from the resources file: which of these things do you think are flaws? Discuss each one in turn - you could draw a tick over the non-flaws or highlight the sentence in one coloured highlighter and a cross over the flaws in a different coloured highlighter . Allah (SWT) has no flaws at all. He is completely flawless in every way - just like we learnt from the name Al-Qudduus, Allah is perfect. Do you think, as Muslims, we want to have flaws like the ones mentioned here? Can you think of any other flaws we should work hard on getting rid of?

Let's think about the other meaning now: The Source of Peace. What does peace mean? Peaceful means calm and quiet and nothing is disturbing you. Everyone stand up and run around, shouting and jumping! Is it peaceful now? No! Now sit down, breathe slowly and deeply, maybe close your eyes. How do you feel now? Is it nice when it's peaceful? Give children a task to do, e.g. threading beads onto a string, a simple jigsaw, drawing a picture from memory, etc. Keep disturbing them by asking continuous questions, making sudden noises, making a mess where they're working, bumping into them etc. Is it easy to concentrate when it's not peaceful? Being at peace is a good thing! Peace can also mean not fighting, e.g. when you stop fighting with someone, you become at peace with each other. Is fighting a good thing??

Did you know, as Muslims when we say "hello" to each other we say, "As-salaamu 'alaikum (wa rahmatullaahi wa barakaatuhu)" - do you recognise that word "salaam" in there? Can you guess the meaning of what we're saying? "Peace be upon you"! Ask children to shake your/each others' hands and give salaam.

Craft activity (20min)

Complete the page for the book.

On part of the page, children can draw around their right hand to represent giving salaam, gluing the "salaam" speech bubble on top. On another part, they can recreate the Post-It note example from earlier about flaws (i.e. turn marks on the star into a picture) using the star template and stick it down.

When to use this name (8min)

When you're angry and you want to calm down, you can make du'aa to Allah as As-Salaam to help you become peaceful again. What about if you've had an argument with someone and want to be their friend again? You can ask As-Salaam to bring peace between you. What about when you need to concentrate on something difficult? Can you think of any other examples when you might want peace?

What about when you've made a mistake, like in the flaws we talked about earlier (show sheet again as a reminder). What kind of du'aa do you think you could make then?

On the back of their page, help the children write a few thoughts about the name As-Salaam and their feelings.

Sticker chart (5min)

Ask individually: Which of Allah’s names did we learn today? What does it mean? Give children a sticker each for their chart.

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Other activities:

- Practise giving salaam to each other again, including e.g. soft toys sitting in a circle together. Relate to appropriate hadiths, e.g. always replying to someone giving you salaam, being the first to give salaam, giving salaam when you enter a room/gathering, replying either with the same length or a longer salaam than you were given. Act out with toys etc. You could extend to creating a mini-poster of hadiths too, e.g. taking photos of the children/soft toys acting out salaam to print out and stick on and use speech bubbles (pre-prepared for children to cut and stick, or let them write them themselves) for the hadith.

- Discuss idea of physical perfection and being flawless - what we look like on the outside doesn't matter to Allah. Discuss the hadith, He looks at our hearts and deeds. Relate to previous name of Al-Qudduus, the story of Nazeef and Aneeq and the activity to do with black spots on the heart.

- Talk to your child and help them think of one or two flaws they have which they want to improve (they can refer to the resource sheet for ideas to start with). Make a mini target poster for them, with the flaw on one side and what they can do to improve on the other. They can decorate it if they wish. Write the date on it, hang it on display from a piece of string and use it as a reminder over the next week or so. After a week, take it down and talk about how they did. To make the activity more inclusive, you can do this as a whole family (including parents!) to show that nobody is perfect and we all have flaws we can work on - so having flaws is ok, but it's better to have the intention to fix them. Can link to hadith on actions being judged by intentions and on how good/bad deeds are recorded based on intention.

Science/Arabic - Body Parts

Following the NC for Year 1 Science, the next set of targets we're aiming to cover are found in the section "Animals, Including Humans":

1) Identify and name the basic parts of the human body (head, neck, arms, elbows, legs, knees, face, ears, eyes, hair, mouth, teeth) through games, actions, songs and rhymes.

2) Draw and label the basic parts of the human body.

3) Say which part of the body is associated with each sense.

4) Use their senses to compare different textures, sounds and smells.

As we've already covered the first target naturally over the past few years, I decided I may as well ensure they have the equivalent knowledge in Arabic... Then that extended to why not just complete the whole topic with an Arabic language link? We've already covered most of the basic parts either through Madinah Arabic Reader Book 1 or our local Arabic club, i.e. head, eye/s, ear/s, mouth, nose, face, hand/s, foot/feet, leg/s - and this has been through games, actions, songs and rhymes as suggested.

First, I drew a simple stickman on the whiteboard and labelled the body parts with the new vocabulary, i.e. hair, tongue, neck, shoulder, elbow, knee. We went through each in turn, with the girls attempting to read each word before I told them what it was, and reminded ourselves of the difference between indefinite/definite nouns (I decided to use singular indefinite - with the exception of "teeth" - for all the words, i.e. "a shoulder", so Arabic words ending in un) by practising changing between them. After some quick games of "Follow My Leader" (i.e. copy the action by moving/touching that body part and repeating the word) and "Simon Says..." (i.e. only move/touch that body part if I said it by the correct name, otherwise don't!) - starting in English then building in the Arabic translations - I gave the twins the pictured worksheet to complete:

I decided to make my own worksheet because the ones I found online you had to pay for and/or the words didn't have the vowel sounds on the letters - meaning my girls would struggle to read them anyway. Plus this meant I could customise the labels to my liking. 👌 I made a suitable image from this free doll making website and typed the Arabic labels using this free online Arabic keyboard.

The worksheet activity is a simple cut-out the Arabic words and stick them in the correct place on the diagram. It reinforces labelling skills/conventions, checks understanding of vocab as well as practising reading Arabic text and fine motor scissor skills. You can either give them the second sheet as-is, so with the Arabic already matched to the translation, or just give them the Arabic list. I decided to give mine just the Arabic words to cut out themselves and the English list as a reference sheet. If you prefer, you could do the worksheet activity first and then follow up with the above mentioned quick games to reinforce.

You can download an editable copy of the worksheet here. Feel free to customise it as you like!

Next, we covered the second target by using this worksheet as a template:

Self-explanatory, they needed to fill in the box with the body parts mentioned then label them on their drawings. They had the option of using each other as models, or myself, if they got stuck. 😂 They underlined the words as they labelled them so they wouldn't miss any out - underlining rather than crossing out so they could still read them!

You can download an editable copy of the worksheet here.

Next, we'll move on to introducing the five senses and practising the related Arabic verbs insha'Allah. 😊

Sorting Animals via a Two-Way Table

As mentioned in this post, we repeated the sorting activity using a different location: this time the Birmingham Wildlife Conservation Park. Our trip to the zoo is still being postponed for better weather (assuming we go in a couple of months it'll serve as good revision insha'Allah 😂) so this was a nice small-scale version of that! You'll notice the rows only have 3 of the 5 classifications as they were the only ones on display. We spent around half a day there, with a picnic and play in the playground, and that was more than enough time to see all the animals at a leisurely pace.

I picked up some of the free leaflets in the foyer and along with some others I had been keeping from the local library, the girls had a large selection of cut-out pictures to choose from. They had to think whether the animal was one they had seen on the day (i.e. they couldn't use the picture of the rhino!) - which was good for memory as we did this activity about a week after we visited - and then sort them into the correct box depending on their classification and diet. This activity was noticeably quicker than the last time we did it, showing their understanding in all areas had had time to solidify... Especially in terms of reading the table and knowing what each box meant!

Meanwhile, our two-year-old chose whichever picture she liked from the pile and made a collage of animals on coloured card - practising her gluing skills, spatial awareness (she didn't want to have them overlapping!) and naming each animal she chose. 👌

Short Chapter Book Recommendations for 4-6 Year Olds

An ongoing list of books we've read throughout the year, so I can remember them in future for younger siblings, insha'Allah! I found it a little difficult finding chapter books for the twins at a level that's a suitable challenge in terms of introducing new vocabulary, but also featuring content they could understand and relate to at Reception age. So this is a list of books I read to them which they enjoyed, sifting out the duds we borrowed from the library. 😂

Just in the order we've read them rather than anything else, but with a rating out of 10 included. 😊

1) The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (Roald Dahl)
Join a young boy as he meets a trio of animal window cleaners and the adventures they get up to. A classic Roald Dahl tale, I chose this one to start with as it's relatively short, has interesting characters and the songs I could sing to my own made-up tunes. My girls liked the poetry sections the best, though I feel some of the content was lost a little on them so definitely one to revisit in later years. They didn't really like the robbery part, but overall it was a nice introduction to Dahl. [7/10]

2) The Magic Finger (Roald Dahl)
A young girl lives next door to a family of hunters, which makes her so angry she accidentally puts "the magic finger" on them! Another short story by Dahl, with a moral against hunting for sport. The length of it was perfect for my girls and they found the idea of ducks swapping places with humans funny. Not sure if they fully got the moral but a good read nonetheless. [7/10]

3) The Snake Who Came to Stay (Julia Donaldson)
A young girl named Polly opens a summer holiday home for pets in her house, much to the despair of her mum! Especially when the snake escapes and there are guinea pigs on the loose... My girls really enjoyed this humorous tale and the chapters often end on a cliffhanger, perfect for comprehension questions and something to look forward to the next day. [9/10]

4) Flat Stanley (Jeff Brown)
When a large bulletin board falls on Stanley during the night, he wakes up the next morning unhurt but completely flat! The story features him dealing with a variety of funny situations, his younger brother's jealousy and even helping catch a pair of famous art thieves. Again, my girls appreciated the humour and could relate to the feelings of the sibling. There were quite a few new words to explain the meanings of, as the book was first published in 1964, but the exposure to new vocabulary is definitely a positive. [8/10]

5) The Iron Man (Ted Hughes)
When a giant metal man appears from nowhere and begins eating all the metal in the countryside, the farmers need to come up with a plan to save themselves... despite a young boy named Hogarth's reluctance. Little do they know a mysterious being from space is on its way and the Iron Man might be their only hope in saving the world! I wasn't sure how my girls would like this, though the writing is definitely at a suitable level, but they actually enjoyed it far more than I thought they would! There's a lot of description in the first chapter, which I acted out for them as we read, but the way the atmosphere is set is done really well and they were able to appreciate the suspense and cliffhangers. I felt the story escalated quite quickly in the latter chapters and the grand moral of world peace passes by too quickly, but overall the girls think it's the best book we've read together so far! [9/10]

6) Little Animal Ark - The Midnight Mouse (Lucy Daniels)
Mandy, a girl who lives in Animal Ark with her veterinarian parents, helps her friend Amy choose a new pet mouse. They have trouble thinking of a name... until that night during a sleepover when they hear strange noises coming from the mouse's cage... I chose this book because I thought my girls would enjoy the animal element, but personally upon reading it I found the writing tedious and the descriptions (although educational in how to look after a mouse) too long and dull. That said, the twins said they liked the book overall, and found the intended funny parts funny, so I may end up borrowing more from this series if we come across them at the library! [5/10]

7) Willow Valley - Birthday Fun (Tracey Corderoy)
It's Riley the mouse's birthday; a charming tale of friendships and parties. I love the descriptions and choice of vocabulary in this book - such a rich reading experience! The plot is nothing amazing, though my girls enjoyed its gentle pace and small adventures, but I would definitely get more from this series for the writing style alone. [8/10]

Prophet Ibraheem (AS) - 06 - The Sacrifice

We read about Prophet Ibraheem (AS) being told to sacrifice his son (this time we used My First Quran Storybook, pages 114-117, as this part of the story isn't included in the Migo & Ali book we've been using so far) and discussed the story along the way, including how Prophet Ibraheem (AS) and Ismail (AS) believed in Allah so much and how they weren't afraid - comparing to how the twins might feel in the same situation!

As a simple reminder, I found a clipart of a ram online and printed it out for the girls to colour and glue pieces of wool onto, after sticking onto their choice of coloured A4 card. Even the toddler joined in! Then they both wrote a sentence to summarise what they had learnt.

Recipe: Chocolate & Vanilla Layered Cake

Ingredients:
3 eggs (60g x 3 = 180g)
180g caster sugar
180g salted butter at room temperature
1 1/2 tbsps milk
1 tsp vanilla essence
90g self-raising flour
70g self-raising flour + 20g cocoa powder

1) Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees (fan) and line two cake tins with greaseproof paper.
2) Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. I used an electric hand whisk.
3) Whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla essence together in a separate bowl with a fork.
4) Beat the egg mixture into the butter/sugar mix a third at a time until completely combined. Again, I used an electric hand whisk.
5) Split half the mixture into a clean mixing bowl (around 270g).
6) Sift 90g of self-raising flour into the remaining mixture in the first bowl, a little at a time, folding in gently (with a spatula or wooden spoon) until completely combined.
7) Sift 70g self-raising flour and 20g cocoa powder into the mixture in the second bowl, a little at a time, folding in gently until completely combined.
8) Pour the mixture from each bowl into cake tins, 1 tin for each mixture.
9) Bake for around 20min, checking with a toothpick to check when it's done (i.e. when poked through the centre, the toothpick comes out clean).
10) Leave to cool for 10min before running a butter knife around the edges of the tins and tipping out onto a baking rack. Leave to cool for at least 20min then slice in half and layer with e.g. buttercream, whipped cream, etc.

For this one I used a thin layer of vanilla buttercream on every layer (100g butter, 200g icing sugar, 1tsp vanilla essence, 1 tsp milk), whipped cream in the centre (~150ml double cream) and chocolate cream on the top and bottom layers (~200ml double cream, ~30g melted milk chocolate). Finally, I sprinkled a crumbled Flake on top.

If you wanted to also cover the edges of the cake, simply increase the amount of buttercream accordingly at a ratio of double icing sugar to butter.

Prophet Ibraheem (AS) - 05 - Ismaeel (AS) and the Zamzam

For this part of the story, we read pages 37 to the top of page 40 in the Migo & Ali book - covering when Prophet Ibraheem (AS) left his wife and baby son in the desert and how the well of zamzam water was found. Again, this was something they were already a little familiar with through previous work, stories and discussions to do with Hajj and Umrah - but to keep with the chronological order of the topic I felt there was no harm in revisiting it.

To recap what happened, we made a simple pop-up craft using A4 card. I prepared the pieces in advance: a horizontal piece of yellow A4 card with a 75mm tall strip glued at the edges a little up from the bottom, the outline of a fountain (about 50mm tall) cut out from blue card, the outlines of hills cut out from brown paper, 2 coloured lolly sticks (I didn't have blue or would have used those!). If your children are more artistically inclined than mine, you may like to let them create these parts themselves!

On the first day, the twins painted the bottom part of the card as well as the strip going across brown (cue revision of which colours from our paints mixed to make brown and demonstration of how changing the ratio of red/yellow/green changes the hue - though by the time they were done it was all one shade of brown anyway 😂) - to represent the desert sand. I would have liked to use sandpaper or craft sand, but we didn't have any to hand so insha'Allah next time! They also coloured in the zamzam water using blue glitter glue pens. We talked about what happened in the story as they worked, then left everything to dry overnight.

The next day, they glued the hills down (recap what Prophet Ibraheem's wife had to do and why, so where did they think they should place the hills on their paper?) and sellotaped the zamzam water to the top of the lolly stick.

Asked them to tell me where the zamzam spring came from and how - then I showed them how to thread the lolly stick under the strip going across so it could move up and down. I then helped them put a strip of sellotape either side of the lolly stick at the bottom of the strip of card, so the stick wouldn't move side to side.

Finally, I asked them what the two hills were called and the twins labelled them with their names.

Number Bonds to 20

Building upon our work on learning the number bonds to 10 (posted about here and here) and their understanding of partitioning, we then expanded this knowledge to calculate and so memorise the number bonds to 20 - with the overall aim of improving their mental maths skills.

I began by giving them a quick oral quiz on which numbers "matched" with each other to give a total of 10, i.e. "What do you add to 2 to make 10?" We then revised what they knew about partitioning numbers into tens and units by going through a couple of examples together on the whiteboard - stopping on the number 20.

I then explained to them how they could use the number bonds to 10 to calculate what number they needed to make a total of 20, because 20 is simply 10 more than 10! I gave them a couple of examples on the whiteboard (e.g. see picture above) then quizzed them to check their understanding.

Finally, I gave them some pages photocopied from Letts Make It Easy... Maths & English (Age 5-6) and Letts Monster Maths - Maths (Age 5-6) to recap and reinforce.

The bottom of the first page (left) was a good opportunity to teach them the importance of showing their working out, in terms of keeping track of what they're doing and working things out step by step, in order to pick up on where they might have made a mistake.

Pine Cone Bird Feeders

We made these as part of our (free!) weekly allotments session, organised by a local children's centre. 🌱

You will need:
Pine cones
Peanut butter + spoon
Mixed seeds + shallow container (e.g. tupperware)
Wool + scissors

1) Spread peanut butter generously over the pine cone.
2) Pour some seeds into a shallow container and roll the pine cone around inside until all the peanut butter is covered.
3) Cut and tie a piece of wool to the top of the cone.
4) Hang the bird feeder in the garden. 🐦🐦🐦


This was simple enough for the twins to do independently (I just helped with tieing the knot in the wool) and my 2 year old enjoyed making one as well!

The peanut butter serves as a nutritious "glue" to stick the seeds on, but you can use alternative bird-friendly fats instead if you/your child has a peanut allergy, e.g. vegetable shortening as a vegetarian option, or something like suet.

MAR Book 1, Lesson 3: Sun and Moon letters

Chapter 3 introduces the Arabic "sun" and "moon" letters, i.e. which letters are vocalised after the al and which are assimilated. So I decided to create a poster with the girls to help them learn and remember them.

[PICTURE]

You can download the file template here.

We went through the alphabet and I asked them to think of an Arabic word which began with each letter, then we used http://images.google.com to search for black and white clipart of a picture to represent their chosen word. As they went along, I copied each picture to the template MS Word file behind the corresponding letter.

When we were done, I printed out the two sheets for them to colour (one each!) then helped them cut and stick the letters onto an A3 piece of coloured paper which had been split in half - the right side for sun (shams) letters and the left for moon (qamar).

Afterwards, we did the exercise at the top of page 22 and read through the words on pages 24-25.