The 6 Articles of Faith

Taking a break from stories of the prophets, I decided to cover the 6 articles of faith with the girls, i.e.

1) Belief in Allah
2) Belief in the angels
3) Belief in the prophets
4) Belief in the holy books
5) Belief in the Day of Judgement
6) Belief in predestination

At this age, I just want them to have an understanding of the basics - insha'Allah there will be plenty of time to go into the details as they get older. (You can download our Reception targets for Islamic Studies in this post.)

We recapped the idea of the 5 pillars in Islam and what they were, by singing a simple nasheed (see this earlier post!) then quizzing them on what the pillars were. The 5 pillars are things all Muslims need to do.

I then explained that as Muslims we also have the 6 articles of faith, i.e. 6 things all Muslims need to believe in. This belief, or faith, is called "imaan" in Arabic.

I showed them the pictured worksheet, with Post-It notes covering each cloud, then asked them to peel off each Post-It note one at a time as I briefly explained what each thing meant. When we were done, they then coloured in the sheet.

You can download the worksheet here.

For "predestination", we linked this to Literacy and knowing about prefixes and root words. I covered the prefix pre- with my finger and we read the word "destination" together. We talked about the meaning of destination as the end point of a journey, or where you're going to end up. Pre- means it happens before/already, or in this case it's been decided already by Allah. So everything that happens and everything we do, Allah already knows about and Allah has already planned for us. It's a little tricky to understand, even for adults! But they just needed to know that Allah is the best of planners and everything that happens, good or bad, is for a reason.