Prophet Musa (AS) - 1 - As a baby

We read the beginning of the story of Prophet Musa (AS) together, from the books which we have, focusing on his mother putting him in the river and how Allah not only kept him safe but also reunited them together - the morals I wanted the girls to understand from this part of the story were 1) to trust in Allah and 2) if Allah wants something to happen, there's nothing anybody can do to stop it from happening.

We talked about how Prophet Musa's mother must have felt when she gave birth to a boy and knew the soldiers would kill him if they found him... We talked about whether it was easy for her to put her baby in the river - because what might happen to him in the river? But what would happen to him if she didn't do it? We related it to baby A (who's now almost 8 months mashaAllah!) and how they would feel having to do that to her - and mothers love their children a lot more than siblings love each other! But where did the idea come from in the first place? It was from Allah so Musa (AS)'s mother trusted it would be ok... And it was!

Since it came up, we had a brief biology lesson into why Firaun's wife needed a nurse for the baby... By "nurse" the book meant "wet nurse" and a wet nurse is a woman who breastfeeds the baby for the mother - maybe the mum can't feed the baby herself for whatever reason (no milk, not enough milk, too busy, doesn't want to!) and in those days they didn't have baby formula and bottles! So why couldn't Firaun's wife feed baby Musa? Because women don't make milk all the time, only after they've had a baby. Firaun's wife hadn't had the baby so that's why she needed a wet nurse for him - and Allah brought Musa (AS)'s mother back to him in this way.

For our craft activity, to help them remember the story, I thought of a simple pop-up type picture - similar to the zamzam picture we did before. I drew my idea on the whiteboard so the twins knew what the end product was supposed to look like:

Then they painted their picture onto white card. We used watercolours again (it feels like watercolours have turned into the art theme for now!) and talked about blending different shades, the direction of their brush strokes (F said they should be horizontal for the river and vertical for the grass!) and how they could layer the paint as it dries.

While the paintings dried, they drew, coloured and cut a picture of a basket from some brown card and sellotaped the back to a blue pipe cleaner. A lolly stick would have been better, but I've still not got round to buying more yet! But this was a good chance to recap materials: we talked about what the problem was (it was too flexible!) and how they could fix it (make it shorter... make it thicker...) - they ended up folding it in half and twisting it about itself which made it a bit more sturdy.

I cut a line along the centre of the river so they could thread their pipe cleaner through and so move the basket by using the pipe cleaner as a handle. Finally, I asked them to write a sentence to summarise what the picture showed.

MashaAllah Z did well, copying her sisters! I think this is the first painting she's done which has actually resembled something and not just a brown mess. 😂