Who Were the Prophets?

For our second article of faith, we looked at belief in the prophets.

We started by recapping the difference between the pillars of Islam (things to do) and the articles of faith (things to believe in) then I got them to recite the shahadah and give a rough translation: "I believe in Allah" (which we did last time as our first article of faith) "and Muhammad (SAW) is his messenger."

But what is a messenger?

We talked about it in everyday terms first, i.e. the person who delivers a message/news/etc. to someone else, using examples they could relate to (e.g. Mama sending one of them as a messenger to tell Papa to wake up!) Then we talked about it in terms of religion, defining it simply as someone Allah sent to tell people not to do bad things and to teach them how to do good things instead. As we've covered Prophet Ibraheem (AS)'s story in detail already, we used him as an example - what were the people doing before he was sent? Praying to idols. What was Prophet Ibraheem (AS) sent to tell them? To pray to Allah instead.

We then talked about other prophets they knew, e.g. from stories I'd told or read to them (we used to read from My First Quran Storybook as bedtime stories when they were 3-4 years old, paraphrased where needed) or they'd heard mentioned in the Quran... and briefly recapped one or two points about each one, e.g. Prophet Yunus was swallowed by a whale; Prophet Adam was the first man and was tricked by Shaytaan into eating from the tree, etc.

I asked them if we were allowed to draw pictures of the prophets and why not? They said no because it was rude - we didn't know what they looked like and we might draw them wrong. 💕

Finally, I showed them the worksheet and we read through it together, with me pausing at the blanks for them to give ideas of what should go there. They were amazed when they heard Allah sent thousands of prophets to mankind! I told them only 25 are mentioned by name in the Quran and we would insha'Allah learn about those ones one at a time, just as we learnt about Prophet Ibraheem (AS). I also checked they knew that no more prophets were going to be sent to us because Allah has already sent His final messenger - and that they knew this was Muhammad (SAW)!

We went through the picture clues together too, with them guessing which prophet's name should go where, then I left them to colour and fill in the sheet themselves. They just wanted help with spelling the prophets' names when they got to that part. 👍 They also noticed that they wrote (AS) after all the prophets' names except for Muhammad (SAW) so we talked about why that was too.

You can download the worksheet here.