Madinah Arabic Reader Book 1 Flashcards

I started making these cards as we went through the first Madinah Arabic Reader book, as I thought the visual aids would be useful in terms of learning the new vocabulary and for building sentences of our own as new grammar patterns were introduced.

Alhamdulillah, after a long break (when I started we didn't have a colour printer which is why these cards are in black and white! Then for continuity's sake I continued making them in this way and colouring everything by hand) I've finally finished all the cards I wanted to make for Madinah Book 1.

Lessons 1-4

Lessons 5-7

Lessons 8-10

Here's an example of what they look like once coloured and laminated:

I chose to colour code the borders to help differentiate between the different kinds of word, thinking this would help with memory and understanding!

Red: Noun (masculine)
Pink: Noun (feminine)
Brown: Proper noun (e.g. countries)
Orange: e.g. "here", "there"
Blue: Adjective
Yellow: Preposition (requires following word to have a kasra)
Purple: Time (e.g. "now", "after")
Green: Miscellaneous (e.g. "very", "also")

I've not included the verbs mentioned in the book as I've made a separate set of verb flashcards - so will be using those alongside these.

We've found these cards useful so I'll continue making them for Madinah Book 2 - but this time I'll upload them in chapter batches as we go along rather than in bulk when we finally finish the book InshaAllah!

Arabic update

The twins have completed Madinah Arabic Reader Book 1 with me and we've just started Book 2, mashaAllah.

Their understanding is pretty good, as we read through the first chapter together and they had no issues with the content.

Current targets:

1) To be able to read more fluently (just need more practise, ideally daily!)

2) To be able to write simple sentences (they can spell words but don't have the confidence to write, especially joined... I need to give them more opportunities to do so!)

One of the grammatical concepts in the current chapter is the idea of the object of a verb in a sentence needing a fatha (and revising the subject needs a dhamma), i.e. "Tuhibbu al-baqaratu al-kitaaba" means "The cow likes the book" [as opposed to "Tuhibbu al-baqarata al-kitaabu" meaning "The book likes the cow"]. So we did some work on the whiteboard to this effect, using different familiar verbs and objects and emphasising that the order of the sentence isn't important, but the meaning comes from the vowel sound on the words.

Then the girls (Z included!) drew and painted a picture of 5 foods they liked to eat (so we could practise the verbs eat, like and want). They painted them with cottonbuds and a dot effect (I'm trying to introduce them to different art techniques where I can within other subjects, as we don't really have a set "Art" time atm!)

Around the house in Arabic

We started this activity off at Arabic club then finished it at home - the girls filled in a template of a house with things found in that room and a family member in each room too. When they were done, they had to describe what they'd drawn in Arabic. MashaAllah, using their knowledge from Arabic club and the Madinah book, they're now able to say sentences such as "My dad is in the bedroom. My sister and I are in the sitting room. My mum is standing in the kitchen with my sister. I am sad on my bed. Z is sitting on the toilet. My sofa is brown. The kitchen is big." etc.

(F is sad in her pic because it's showing the time Z pushed her and took F's car - I think it happened the day before? So obviously still on her mind! Which was a good eye opener for me that things might need following up on a little more for her to get over them... But alhamdulillah she's able to express herself like this and could talk about it easily with me when asked.)

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.

MAR Book 1, Lesson 8: "this/that x ..."

More whiteboard work to help practise grammar from this chapter and revise old vocab:

The pictures are what they needed to describe. The sentences showed how I expected them to begin their descriptions and the words in purple were prompts for them to talk about... Although they ended up not needing them at all the second time round! e.g. "tilka al'bintu tasbahu fil bahri" 👍

Arabic: A/The/This Noun + Adjective

I made this chart because I was having problems getting my head around the difference between e.g. "the apple is red", "the red apple", "this is a red apple" etc. So I made the effort to sit down and make a colour coded list of all the combinations in both masculine and feminine form.

To be honest, it was going through systematically and working the sentences out myself which really helped it to all click, and I'm sure this kind of thing already exists elsewhere... But if you want it as a reference anyway, you can download the mini poster here.

I've backed ours onto coloured paper, laminated and holepunched it to keep in our Arabic resources folder.

MAR Book 1, Lesson 6: "belongs to"/"for" using لِ

Some of the work we did on the whiteboard when covering this chapter in the Madinah Arabic Reader Book 1... Almost entirely oral, as usual, with lots of practise making sentences and phrasing questions:

I drew all of the above on the board and the girls took it in turns to read a question and give the answer according to the picture.

I drew the above pictures and wrote the questions for the girls to read as prompts. Then they took it in turns asking the other who each object belonged to, starting from the top - after the first answer I wrote the sentence in green as a prompt. Depending on their sister's answer, I drew an arrow pointing towards who the object belonged to. Because they answered everything with the girl (which they found hilarious!) I asked how they thought the boy and girl were feeling, to which they answered in Arabic ("She is happy and he is angry!") so we changed their expressions accordingly. 😂

Allah made everything

Back to basics with the beginning of the story of Prophet Adam (AS)!

We made this picture around two years ago, when we were first learning about Allah and how He created the world - so when the twins were almost 4. I stuck down green and blue paper to represent the land and sea on dark blue A3 sugar paper (dark blue as it could be either day or night!) and drew some pictures of natural things created by Allah (this was before we owned a printer!). I tried to choose things which would be useful to know in Arabic. We spoke about how Allah created everything from nothing and how we were grateful to Him. Then I gave them the pictures to colour in and cut them out when they were done. Finally, I helped them glue the pictures in appropriate places on the A3 background.

After a break (as they were still only young!) we recapped what we had made and why (a picture to show some of the things Allah made from nothing). Then we continued the story of Prophet Adam (AS) - how Allah created the first man and taught him the names of each thing - and I labelled each picture in English as the girls told me what they were. We spoke about how the angels didn't know what each thing was called because Allah hadn't taught them. I asked the girls how they thought it felt not to know that the sun was called the sun and they laughed! So I asked them what the sun was in Arabic, which of course they couldn't do. 😏 Then we went through each thing on the picture and I told them what it was in Arabic:

the sun: ash-shamsu اَلشَّمْسُ

the cloud: al-ghaymatu اَلْغَيْمَةُ

the moon: al-qamaru اَلْقَمَرُ

the star: an-najmu اَلنَّجْمُ

the sky: as-samaa'u اَلسَّمَاءُ

the sea: al-bahru اَلْبَحْرُ

the grass: al-‘ushbu اَلْعُشْبُ

the mountain: al-jabalu اَلْجَبَلُ

the tree: ash-shajaratu اَلشَّجَرَةُ

the flower: az-zahratu اَلزَّهْرَةُ

the lion: al-asadu اَلْأَسَدُ

the horse: al-hisaanu اَلْحِصَانُ

the dog: al-kalbu اَلْكَلْبُ

the bird: at-tayru اَلطَّيْرُ

the fish: as-samakatu اَلسَّمَكَةُ

We stuck with the definite form for everything so as to not get confused with grammar, but my husband felt it was important to introduce the idea of word endings from the start (rather than e.g. just saying "shams" for sun).

The idea was to write out labels in Arabic for the girls to glue next to the correct picture, but we never got round to it and the project went forgotten until now. 🙈

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Fast-forward to today and our current work on the Prophet Adam (AS). I dug out this old poster for them and we recapped again about how Allah created everything from nothing and how everything in the world is only here because Allah allowed it to exist, e.g. who made the paper we were looking at? Did Allah make the paper Himself? No, people made it... But how did people make paper? They made it out of trees. And where did the trees come from? Allah made them! So the girls understood that everything in the world was either created by Allah or made out of something Allah had created. We also talked about the trees we can see today - did Allah create this particular tree in our garden? No, he created the first trees a long long long time ago which made seeds, which grew into more trees, which made seeds, which grew into more trees, which made seeds, and so on and so on until we get to today. Just like how Allah made us, not because He created us himself (they know about babies being in their mummy's tummy) but because Allah made the first man (and woman) and they're like our great great great great (too many "great"s to say!) grandparents!

Then we checked we could still name all the things in Arabic, using the definite/"the" form and then changing to the indefinite/"a" form.

Morning Activity (Arabic reading/understanding)

We've not done as much work from the Madinah book as we should have over the past few months; I'd become complacent since joining an Arabic speaking club... 😅 So when I finally decided to pull it out the other day, I was disappointed to see the girls had forgotten some of the things they'd previously been confident in when we covered them! And we've not done nearly enough reading practise as we should have been either, so they've become a little slower in that too. 😩

It's hard finding the time at the moment with a newborn to tend to! So I've come up with simply putting something on the whiteboard each morning for them to work on while I get breakfast ready or feed and change the baby. Once they've answered the question, we can eat breakfast... A little motivation to keep their attention. 😂

Some examples... We started off by having to match the sentence to the correct picture. I chose vocabulary which they seemed to have forgotten as a way of revision - so they would use the pictures as prompts to help their reading and the sentences helped them remember old vocab. 

After a few days of those, so they got used to the idea and routine of it, I changed the question slightly... So a longer sentence (actually two: a question and answer) and they had to say which image illustrated it correctly.

So this helps revise old grammar points too.

I write the task on the board after they've gone to bed, so the first time they see it is in the morning. It's working well for us so far as I've already seen their reading improve - whereas before I struggled to find time to fit in focused Arabic reading on a daily basis, this is a nice top up for those days when we really don't have time. It's also been good for their teamwork skills as they can discuss what they think and fill in the gaps where the other struggles. Between them they've always managed to work it out, while I'm sure they wouldn't have been able to alone! 💕 My messy handwriting also doesn't help, so being able to decipher it is a skill in itself too. 😂

***EDIT***

Some more examples as we've continued:

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.

MAR Book 1, Lesson 1: "This is a..."

Our first formal lessons in learning Arabic... Decided to use the Madinah Arabic Reader series as I've already gone through the first few chapters myself in the past - just bought the Reader version as it's a bit more accessible for children (in that the layout is nicer to look at and there are colour pictures; the content is exactly the same).

I'm using the book as a guideline - we'll go through it in order but we'll be doing the work mainly verbally as opposed to written and I'll adapt the lessons into activities for the kids... We'll cover most of the vocabulary but as the book is aimed at older ages we'll only briefly go over the words which aren't really relevant/difficult for home educating 4 year olds to understand (e.g. "university", "student", "headteacher", etc.!)

So the first lesson begins with هَذَا (this is) and introduces some common nouns, most of which are easily found around the house. Before even showing the book to the girls, I decided to run through this vocab with them by taking them round the house and saying the sentences on the first page for them to repeat. After a few rounds of repetition we continued to the next concept on page 2, turning the phrases into questions: مَا هَذَا؟ (what is this?) and أَهَذَا ... ؟ (is this ... ?). So I would point at e.g. the door and ask either, "What is this?" or "Is this a door?" and have the girls reply in sentences, e.g. "Yes, this is a door." or "No, this is a pen." This took a maximum of 10 minutes to do and I wasn't fussed if they made mistakes - it was all very playful, in silly voices, moving around - if they made a mistake, I'd just say what it was supposed to be for them to repeat. No pressure. And they enjoyed the questioning part since the questions were so ridiculous (really, Mama, you're asking if a pen is a door?? 😂) and I kept the timing short on purpose so it wouldn't get boring or tedious.

I then wrote the 9 words on page 1 onto our whiteboard by drawing a picture in one colour and writing the transliterated Arabic underneath in another. In hindsight, next time I'd include the actual Arabic too even if they can't read it just for exposure. We revisited the board over the next couple of days then read through up to the top of page 7 together, translating as we went along. For the exercise on page 7 we didn't do any writing; I just said the sentence in either English or Arabic and the girls needed to translate it into the other language. The next day, we did some simple flashcard activities where I held up a picture for them to translate or I pointed at one from a selection and they needed to ask a question. Since then, we just substituted the Arabic words into our everyday life wherever we could, regardless of whether the grammar made sense or not - it was more for vocab practice. e.g. "Can you open the baabun for me?" (Don't worry about the grammar as this is easily corrected as you progress through the lessons!)


The mini flashcards I made for Chapters 1-4 can be downloaded here. Black and white, for the option for the kids to colour them themselves while revising vocab. I printed then laminated mine and colour coded the borders: red = m. nouns, pink = f. nouns, blue = adjectives, yellow = prepositions, green = other. Verbs haven't been introduced in the book yet.