Who was the Prophet Nuh (AS)?

We read through several different versions of the story of Prophet Nuh (AS) from the different books we have at home, and discussed it along the way:

When we were done, I asked the girls how do we know this story? How do we know this happened to Nuh (AS)? After some prompting and discussion, the girls came upon the answer that Allah talks about Nuh (AS) in the Quran. I took out the English translation to find an example of where Allah speaks about the Prophet Nuh (AS) - after looking through the contents of all the surahs, Surah Nuh seemed like a good one to read through! The English was a little difficult for them to understand all the words, but they understood enough to see it was part of the story we'd just read. I explained that the rest of Prophet Nuh (AS)'s story is in different surahs in the Quran, not all in one place like in the books we'd just looked at.

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We were gifted some small toy animals from my parents when the twins were younger, and because they used to fight a lot over the same toy at that age it meant we have pairs of animals to play with. 😂😂 So we used these to practise our 2x table in the context of counting the animals walking onto the ark, and sang the song, "The Animals Went In Two By Two" (Hurrah! Hurrah!) as we played with them. 😁😁

We also had a conversation about why two animals were chosen, why not more (because there would be no space!) and why not less (because you need two to make more!). And about how a male and female animal (including humans as well as other living things such as plants) are needed to make a baby. We didn't go into the details of reproduction! Just that you need a male and a female pair. M noted that it wouldn't make sense to have two male animals or two female animals going on the ark, they must have been one of each. Then I gave them a quick explanation of how by starting with just two animals, they were able to keep multiplying to get lots and lots more after some time - so even though Nuh (AS) couldn't take e.g. all the elephants with him, by taking just two elephants it made sure that all the elephants didn't disappear completely (or become extinct) after the flood.

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After a couple of days, we revisited the story and I asked the girls to summarise it for me - which they were able to do, MashaAllah. Then I told them they were going to have a go at making their own boat. What did Prophet Nuh (AS) use to build the ark? Wood! So we were going to use wooden lolly sticks to make ours as a mini version. We were also going to use PVA glue to stick our pieces together... but do they think Prophet Nuh (AS) used glue? No! He used a hammer and nails.., But we were just going to use glue since we're just making a model.

I gave them all the lolly sticks we had left in our craft supplies, some PVA glue and a couple of brushes to spread it with. Then told them to work together to make a boat and we could test it in the bathtub later, inshaAllah!

This is the first open ended creative building kind of task I'd set the girls, so I was interested to see what they'd do... It was great to see them discuss ideas, try something out, evaluate as they went along, make mistakes and change their plans... I tried my best not to give them any input from myself but used comments and questions such as, "What are you going to do next?", "Did that work the way you wanted it to?", "It keeps falling down. Why do you think that is?", "How could you make it stronger?", etc.

They began by making a "floor" by gluing a row of lolly sticks together. It kept sliding apart so one had the idea of putting a stick perpendicular underneath to keep them in place, which then became a stick glued on top perpendicular to the rest and they glued some more in the original line to complete the length. They were still sliding up and down a bit, so the girls decided to glue another perpendicular stick on top at the other end - then decided to just fill in in between and have another long row of sticks on top but perpendicular to the ones underneath. They were happy this gave a solid structure so now wanted to put some "walls" on their boat. First, they tried gluing a stick on its edge, which took several attempts to get to stand straight. Then they tried gluing another on top to make their wall taller, but no matter how they tried it wouldn't balance right. So they decided to keep the wall only one stick high and make an identical wall on the other side. Then they wanted to put a "roof" on the boat by gluing a stick on top of the two walls to join them together - but the weight of the stick on top made their walls fall down. So they came up with the idea of making their walls thicker and, because they wanted them identical, made both walls three lolly sticks wide. They only had two sticks left now so glued them both across as the roof.

I think if we had more sticks they would have happily kept going! I was really pleased to see them so engaged and determined even when it was tricky to get the sticks to stay in place and the structure didn't work out the way they wanted it to. 💕

We left their boat to dry overnight (why? because the glue was still wet so if we tried to put it in the bathtub now it would just fall apart!) then took it in the bathroom to test.

We talked about the story of Prophet Nuh (AS) again and the girls remembered that it wasn't raining at all when he built the ark, so there was no way Nuh (AS) could test it would work! He just had to trust in Allah, which he did. So we put their boat into the bathtub without any water.



Then the rain came (turn the shower on!) which didn't stop for 40 days and 40 nights! The girls were excited to see their little boat float up on the water as it rose (I purposefully aimed the showerhead to the side of the bath rather than on top of their boat!) and watched it spin and float this way and that. Was there any way of controlling which direction the boat was going? No, it was just being carried away with the water, just like the ark was with Nuh (AS) on it. We turned the shower off and watched the boat float for a while. What happened next in the story, after the rain stopped? The girls said the water all went away and then Nuh (AS) and all the animals could come off again. So we drained all the water away from the tub.

I asked if the girls wanted to do it again but this time with animals on their boat? Of course, the answer was yes! So we put a pair of animals on the boat and turned the shower on again. There was only room on their boat for one pair of animals - we talked some more about how large the ark must have been to fit in a pair of every animal, plus Nuh (AS) and all the believers! We tried squeezing another pair of animals on but their boat sunk and the other animals fell off... much to their amusement. 😂

Finally, we drained all the water away and retold how the ark stopped on top of a mountain for Nuh (AS) and the believers to finally disembark. By this point the glue on our boat was starting to get washed away and the sticks come apart, so we talked some more about the materials Nuh (AS) used to make the ark and what we could do next time if we wanted to make our lolly stick boat last longer!

MAR Book 1, Chapter 8: The hospital

I made a worksheet for the end of this chapter to help consolidate the new vocab and sentence structures.

The first side is a simple cut and stick activity to complete the sentences in a way which makes sense (cut and stick as opposed to choose and copy, since the twins aged 5 aren't that confident writing in Arabic yet!). This was also good reading practise for them.

The second side they just needed to draw pictures either in front of or behind the hospital, then say the sentences to describe what they had done.

You can download our worksheet here.

Editing a piece of (descriptive) writing

Following on from their typing practise, we used their typed up work as a basis for learning how to edit.

Since we only have one laptop, the girls needed to take it in turns. F went first with M watching, as I talked her through what she needed to do. When she was done, we discussed together what they thought the steps were for editing something and I wrote these on the whiteboard:

1) Read your work.

2) Fix any mistakes.

3) Change words which are the same.

4) Make it sound better!

5) Add more detail.

Then M had her turn, with me talking her through, but also referring to the steps we'd generated together. F watched for a bit then went to play but in the same room - so she'd keep chiming in to help when she overheard M getting stuck. 😂

These are the before and after results:

For point 2, fixing mistakes, they found spelling errors and use of the wrong tense (I didn't realise they didn't know the meanings of past/present/future! So we discussed this... Though I decided to omit the word "tense" for simplicity's sake). For point 3, they tried to get rid of too many "and"s as well as repetitive nouns or adjectives. For point 4, this was changing boring words (e.g. where M changed "buzzing" to "noisy", although personally I prefer the former!) and rewriting sentences (e.g. F shortened her original to "I could smell stinky mud"). For point 5, they just added an extra adjective here and there.

A little while later we edited a different short description they had previously typed up, except this time I printed it out for them to practise handwriting instead.

I asked if they remembered the steps for editing their writing, which they did! So once they told me what they were, we went through and did them one by one. For each point, I asked them to choose a different coloured pencil to underline with - so they knew when they were copying that if they came across something underlined, that meant they needed to change or add something! Once we'd been through and underlined everything and I'd written correct spellings on the whiteboard, I left them to it to do.

Arabic: Days & Months display

We've had a months and days display on one of our doors for over two years, so I thought it was time it was updated! And this was a perfect chance to introduce more Arabic into our everyday lives by incorporating the Arabic days of the week and the Islamic months written in Arabic. I decided not to include the Gregorian months in Arabic as I felt it wasn't really necessary; having the Islamic months on display is more relevant and useful to us. 😊 

You can download the days of the week display wheel here.

The start of the week is red and the other 6 days follow the colours of the rainbow - the idea being to double up this display as a colour wheel to remind the girls of a) the colours of the rainbow and b) which primary colours mix together to make which secondary colours.

I cut and laminated the wheel then attached it to a piece of A4 card through the centre using a split pin. The A4 card is blu-tacked to the door and the wheel itself can spin freely. I cut out an arrow from an old gift bag to show the current day of the week.

There's currently a large gap on the card under the paper... I was thinking of writing the sentence in Arabic, "What day is it today?", or something similar, but haven't got round to it yet. 😅

You can download the months of the year display poster here: 1st half / 2nd half.

The purpose of the colours on this poster are to show a gradient (following the standard order when using e.g. MS Word or Adobe Photoshop etc.) and also differences in hues, as the Islamic months are simply the same colour as the Gregorian month it's next to but in a lighter shade.

I don't have an A3 printer but I wanted the poster that size, which is why I've split it across two A4 sheets. I trimmed the bottom edge of the first sheet so the white space between June and July was equal to the space between all the other months, then laminated both together in one A3 laminating pocket. This is blu-tacked to the door along with two more arrows cut from an old gift bag, with blu-tac on the back, which can move up and down the side of the poster accordingly.

Finally, I used some silver star stickers to stick in each of our family members' birth month and wrote our birthdays in the centre of each. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

The National Space Centre

We visited The National Space Centre in Leicester as part of our topic on the seasons. Since Leicester is relatively near to Birmingham, we ended up purchasing a year pass as going at least twice means any additional visits work out as being "free". So with the view of visiting again later, we focused just on the exhibits relevant to our topic or the solar system in general.

Some of the things we saw, amongst many others:

A mechanical representation of the Earth orbiting the sun and the moon orbiting the Earth.

A rotating model to show the reason we have day and night.

Part of the Solar System gallery, with each planet having its own themed section to walk through and explore.

The actual Mars Rover scheduled to be sent to Mars, insha'Allah!

Overall, the trip was a really good experience for the girls in consolidating their knowledge and opening up opportunities for more questions. 👍

Planting Tulips

My parents gave us some tulip bulbs as a souvenir from their mini break to Amsterdam. There were 8 bulbs in the pack, and we had 4 pots (one for each girl!), so the twins worked out they could plant 2 bulbs in each pot... They could do their own, and Mama could plant the baby's for her. 😁

The twins had gardening gloves (bought last year!) whilst the toddler didn't... So the former used their hands to put the compost in whilst the latter used a trowel - and we reused the compost from the dwarf beans we had planted in the Summer. The girls, MashaAllah, remembered which way up to plant the bulbs from their time at the allotments and knew how to half fill the pot with compost, make a well for the bulbs to go inside root way down, then cover them up with more compost.

When they were done, I arranged the pots in age order (left to right) against the fence which gets most sun in the garden. Insha'Allah they'll bloom in the Spring without any more work from us!

Whilst in the garden (we've not played in it since the end of Summer, really) we noticed some sunflowers had grown in the grass! We planted sunflowers last February and really looked after them - watering them daily and weeding the area around them on a consistent basis. The sunflowers which grew last year were taller than the fence, MashaAllah! And the girls were really proud of them. 🌻🌻 We didn't plant any this year since our youngest was born in July, yet somehow some sunflowers had grown... How? The girls worked out some seeds must have fallen from our old plants and planted themselves in the soil! When the shoots and leaves grew in Autumn, they looked familiar... So we asked Papa to mow around them when he did the grass. Now it was almost Winter they had finally grown heads and we were right to have guessed they might have been sunflowers! But these sunflowers were nowhere near the size of our old ones... Why? Because we didn't look after them! So this was a good lesson in the importance of weeding and watering. 👌

They did actually bloom not long after, but I forgot to take any photos of them before they died. 🙈

Learning about Weight

So we'd already looked at grams in the context of making gingerbread men and kg in the context of their own weight, looked at different objects around the house in order to estimate then weigh them, ordered different objects from heaviest to lightest...

I had this worksheet already photocopied but I'd been putting off giving it to the girls to complete because I thought they would need lots of help and the baby needed a lot of attention at the time. So when I eventually gave them the sheet, I was surprised yet pleased to find out they were able to complete it independently! MashaAllah! 😍😍 I literally gave it to them to read through while I went to do something (maybe change the baby's nappy?) and when I came back they were halfway through. Lol. 😂 Shows I need to challenge them more!!