Ramadaan Prep 2018 - Useful Things To Do in Advance!

I feel like I've not prepared as much this year as last - actually, I know I haven't because most of it is just a repeat/re-using what I did last year. 😂😅

Things for me:

1) Batch cook and then freeze individual portions of onions/garlic/tomatoes to save cooking time during Ramadaan. I started this around a month before Ramadaan last year and actually have just continued doing it ever since! I'll buy one bag of onions, one garlic and two packs of salad tomatoes during the weekly shop and cook them all at once one day during the week. I'll take out the extra mix and keep in individual freezer bags in the freezer (so one bag per meal) then cook whatever dinner I'm making that day with what's left in the pan. Then later on in the week when I don't have time to cook from scratch, I can just defrost one bag in the pan (or two if I plan to cook a larger amount to last for two days!), add the relevant salt/spices/meat/veg and dinner is done in less than half an hour. 👌 In the weeks before Ramadaan, I'll make sure I have enough in the freezer so that I won't have to do any cooking from scratch for the whole 30 days, insha'Allah. Alhamdulillah, Ramadaan is not all about the food in this household... And I'm grateful my husband prefers a proper meal at the end of the day instead of the usual fried foods which take much more time and energy to prepare!

2) Clean the house! Change all the bedsheets, scrub down the kitchen and bathroom, mop the hard floors, vacuum the carpets (including behind sofas, those nooks and crannies, etc.) If I know its all been done properly just before Ramadaan, I'm happy just wiping down and vacuuming visible surfaces until the month's over. 😊

3) Have a general tidy up/declutter. All those sideboards and shelves which somehow accumulate junk... Old clothes and toys, ready to give away to charity... This process takes a good few weeks as I don't have time to do it all in one go otherwise! Then one final sweep through the house in the days before. 💪 Similarly, any odd jobs around the house which need doing but have been put off (e.g. DIY things, filing paperwork, the garden, etc.), we try and get those done before the month starts, too!

4) Plan Eid outfits. At least get the clothes bought and the outfits decided, even if I don't iron them - I did that before and somehow they ended up creased in the wardrobe anyway, so now I've decided to just do them the night before Eid instead, insha'Allah. 😅

5) Buy and wrap Eid gifts. Another thing I don't want to waste time thinking about or doing during Ramadaan itself!

6) Set a Quran goal. I made a list last year with how many pages I'd need to read a day in order to complete the whole Quran within the month - I'll admit I'm not the most fluent of readers, so it was useful for me to have a concrete benchmark each day to work towards. I also worked out how long it would take me to read that many pages and planned a suitable time each day to fit it in. Last year, it happened that I'd have some time after Fajr and some between Maghrib and Isha (i.e. when the kids were asleep!) so I could split my reading between then.

7) Set a Hifz target. I'll also admit my strengths definitely don't lie in memorisation! A manageable goal from before was to memorise one ayah from Surah Al-Mulk each day, which meant the whole surah could be completed by the end of the month. 💕 This year, I think I'll make the effort to concentrate on Juz 'Amma - with the added goal of being able to help my children with their hifz more easily too, insha'Allah!

Things for the kids:

8) Get the decorations ready! Previously, I've put them all up myself the night before as a surprise for the kids... Now they're a bit older, I'll let them help out and it'll reduce my workload too. 😂 Same goes for Eid decorations - some of them are pre-bought (e.g. tinsel, balloons, etc.) but others we can make together during the month as an activity in itself, insha'Allah.

9) Prepare a Ramadaan calendar. I've seen lots of beautiful ones (but expensive or time-consuming to make! 🙈) online, but last year I simply printed out the numbers 1-30 (in both English and Arabic numerals), mounted it on a piece of coloured card, they coloured it in and decorated the edges. Each day the twins would take it in turns to stick a sticker in the morning to signify which day we were on and a sticker in the evening to show the day had ended... (I also prepared a small container with pre-cut stickers for them to choose from, so will be re-using that, insha'Allah!) Not sure how we're going to do it this year with three kids lol - just more taking in turns! Maybe when they're a little older they can have individual calendars, especially if they're going to try and keep the odd (whole/half) fast here and there, but for now we don't have the wall space or desire for clutter. 😂😅🙈 You can download our calendar template here.

10) Decide on 30 Good Deeds. We did this last year and it worked well - the girls have requested to do it again this year! So with the lack of time, I'm re-using what we prepared last time lol. We decorated an old container with tissue paper mache and stickers; I printed out 30 flower shaped templates onto coloured card (you can download the Word file here) and cut them out, then we talked about the kinds of good deeds we could do and I wrote 30 of them out, one on each flower, for them to then decorate the petals with glitter glue pens. Aside from needing a little touch up (as some of the writing has faded, especially with the paler glitter gel pens!) these are fine to use again this year, I think! So the cards go in the container, they take it in turns to choose one at random each morning, then they have the day to complete/focus on that good deed. We couple this with reminders on gaining reward and how the month of Ramadaan is blessed with the chance to get even more reward than usual! Here's our list of 30 deeds, for reference:

1. Smile at people outside.
2. Feed the birds.
3. Listen to Mama and Papa straightaway.
4. Give salaam quickly.
5. Share my things.
6. Say "Bismillah" before doing things.
7. Say "SubhanAllah" 100 times.
8. Say "Alhamdulillah" 100 times.
9. Say "Allahu akbar" 100 times.
10. Make dua to Allah.
11. Make dua for someone else.
12. Help Mama with some chores.
13. Tidy up after myself.
14. Give some toys to charity.
15. Tidy up my bedroom.
16. Say "please", "thank you", "sorry" and "excuse me".
17. Call Nani for a chat.
18. Make a card for Dadima.
19. Speak in a soft voice.
20. Let someone else go first.
21. Learn more Arabic.
22. Read extra Quran.
23. Pray sunnah prayers.
24. Not waste water.
25. Not waste colouring pens.
26. Help look after our little sister.
27. Bake food for someone.
28. Donate to a food bank.
29. Give people compliments.
30. Make Eid decorations.

After they chose a deed each morning, we'd put Blu-tac on the back and stick them around the fireplace as both a reminder and to create a wall display of flowers. After the month was over, we left them up for a short while then took the opportunity to discuss them as we took them down.

11) Prepare 30 Hadith to read through together! I think we'll just use this book again this year, as all the work's been done for us: 30 Hadith for Kids by Zanib Mian. We used this a discussion prompt in the evenings just before bed, like a bedtime story replacement. The girls used to look forward to it, and the book's been put away since, so I'm sure they'll look forward to it again this year, insha'Allah. 💕 Maybe when they're older, we can concentrate more on hadith specific to Ramadaan and fasting, but just introducing the idea of hadith and familiarising the girls with the idea of them is enough for me at this stage.

12) Have a Quran routine ready. Alhamdulillah, we already try and have daily Quran sessions but admittedly these are sometimes missed on particularly busy days or cut short for one reason or another... So I need to ensure more priority is put on the Quran - and Ramadaan is a good boost for doing so. Many people say that first thing in the morning is the best time to do it, so I think I'm going to try having a half an hour slot blocked out after their breakfast. Once we get into the routine of it, I'm hoping it will then stick even once Ramadaan is over, insha'Allah! Within this month, though, I want to spend 5 minutes at the end of each session reading through some translations of surahs they know... Ideally, this should be planned out already! But honestly, I've not had the time to do it so will just have to wing it each day. 😅 The idea being to strengthen their bond with the Quran, especially if we can pick out Arabic vocabulary they know within ayaat, too.

Smarties and Zakat!

Continuing our topic on the five pillars of Islam, we did a nice cross-curricular lesson on zakat - along with Arabic and Numeracy. 😁

To begin, I prepared a load of Smarties to represent money; the twins needed to "work" to earn money. Their work was answering (verbally, although you could do this as a written exercise if you wanted) questions to do with Arabic, e.g. "What letter does 'shams' (sun) start with?" "What does 'daairah' (circle) mean?" "How do you say 'the dog is in the room'?" "What is 'waahid' (one) plus 'waahid'?" etc etc. When they got a question correct I paid them in Smarties (sometimes one, sometimes more depending on how tough the question was) until they had a total of 40 Smarties between them (because I'm a perfectionist and wanted the 2.5%... Though I didn't tell them that detail 😂).

They looked at their 40 Smarties and we discussed how rich they were, etc. Then I simplistically explained zakat in terms of charity we HAVE to give - because Allah blessed us with wealth to begin with and some of it isn't ours, it belongs to Allah, but He's so kind WE get to choose which charity we want to give it to! - and asked them to guess how much money/many Smarties they think they HAVE to give as zakat. One guessed 9, the other 12 - so it was the perfect reaction when they discovered it was only 1. 😆 Not much at all yet it makes the rest of our money even better and cleaner (Smarties tastier!) So they gave the 1 to their little sister. 💕

We practised Numeracy by dividing the 39 left equally between the two of them... The 1 remainder led into a discussion about sadaqah, and our choice to give extra charity if we wish, so they gave that to their sister too... 💕💕

End of lesson: eat the Smarties! And if they wanted milk they had to ask for it in Arabic. 😜

They don't have sweets often so the idea was the excitement and novelty would make the lesson more memorable. You could always substitute for any other treat of your choice, though. And if you don't have children to divide between, you could link the topic with e.g. days of the week practise and divide by however many days they're allowed to eat their treat over (because let's face it, 40 odd Smarties in one go is a lot! 19 is passable as a one off... lol).

Fard & sunnah prayers

MashaAllah, the twins have been aware of the 5 daily prayers for a while (see this blog entry for a simple song/poster) but I wanted to do something for each pillar as we cover them this topic... So decided to introduce them to the idea of sunnah prayers. Naturally, to do that they needed to learn what "fard" meant too!

Fard = compulsory, they HAVE to be done - these are the prayers of the pillar of salah.

Sunnah = you don't have to do them but you can if you want to gain extra reward. These are extra prayers the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) used to do.

Everything is very simple at this point! The twins are only just turned 4 1/2 after all!

Next I took out their maths multilink cubes, though you could do the same thing with Lego, wooden blocks, etc. Anything which has different colours and can stack.

We chose red and orange to represent fard. One cube was equal to one rakat. Red meant it was read aloud; orange meant it was read silently. Cue a quick quiz to find out how many rakaat each prayer has and asked the twins to "build" each prayer:

Fajr: 2 red (2)
Dhuhr: 4 orange (4)
'Asr: 4 orange (4)
Maghrib: 2 red, 1 orange (3)
'Isha: 2 red, 2 orange (4)

Lined them up together so they could compare the sizes of the towers they made - numeracy link in counting the cubes and checking the total: 17 rakaat. They pointed out Fajr was the smallest while Dhuhr, 'Asr and 'Isha were the same size. An important observation to keep in mind for later!

Next I asked them to explain to me what sunnah prayers were, i.e. repeat back to me what I'd just told them earlier to check their understanding. 😊

We chose green cubes to represent each rakat of sunnah prayer. Then I told them how many rakaat are typically associated with each prayer so they could add to their towers. The objective wasn't for them to be able to recall exactly how many go where, but the exercise was more in gaining that initial awareness for building on in future years, inshaAllah.

I also told them whether the sunnah prayers came before or after the fard prayers, so their towers ended up like this:

Fajr: 2 green, 2 red (4)
Dhuhr: 4 green, 4 red, 4 green (12)
'Asr: 4 red (4)
Maghrib: 2 red, 1 orange, 2 green (5)
'Isha: 2 red, 2 orange, 2 green (6)

Finally, I explained there was a very special white cube which needed to go at the end of one of the prayers... This white cube was called 'witr' and was special because it wasn't really fard but it was part of the prayer you really shouldn't miss... And it goes at the end of 'Isha. 😁

So the final towers lined up together looked like:

Fajr: 2 green, 2 red (4)
Dhuhr: 4 green, 4 red, 4 green (12)
'Asr: 4 red (4)
Maghrib: 2 red, 1 orange, 2 green (5)
'Isha: 2 red, 2 orange, 2 green, 1 white (7)

They compared and discussed them again: Fajr wasn't the smallest anymore! It was the same size as 'Asr! And Maghrib was only 1 bigger than them! They really found it funny how our Dhuhr tower kept falling over, it was that tall! But insha'Allah that means the fact Dhuhr is the longest when you add in all the sunnah prayers will stay in their mind. And they both liked the one white cube of witr because it was so special. 😂

We finished by counting and adding together the total number of rakaat: 32! A lot more than 17! And emphasised the sunnah prayers were a choice, to gain extra reward, but the red/orange fard cubes were prayers they definitely couldn't miss - once they were at the age to do them... A good few years from now insha'Allah! 💕

Song: The Five Pillars

I wrote a simple song (nasheed, if you prefer?) to help my girls not only learn but understand the very basics of the five pillars of Islam: testimony of faith (shahadah), prayer (salah), charity (zakat), fasting (sawm) and pilgrimage (hajj).

Sung to the tune of "The Wheels On The Bus". 🚌

(CHORUS)

In Islam, there are five pillars,

Five pillars,

Five pillars.

In Islam, there are five pillars,

Which Muslims all believe in.

The shahadah says that Allah is One:

Laa ‘ilaaha

‘illa-llah,

And Muhammad is His messenger:

Wa Muhammadur-rasoolu-llah.

(CHORUS)

Salah we pray five times a day:

Fajr, Dhuhr,

And ‘Asr,

Maghrib, ‘Isha, five salah.

The prayers we offer daily.

(CHORUS)

Zakat we give to charity,

To help the poor

And the needy.

Zakat, it makes our wealth all clean,

And stops us being greedy.

(CHORUS)

Sawm, we fast in Ramadhaan,

Don’t eat or drink

Til the sun goes down.

Be patient, kind and helpful.

Fasting makes us grateful.

(CHORUS)

Hajj is the holy pilgrimage,

To where Prophet

Ibrahim used to live.

Just once in our life when we have the means,

We should make this journey.

(CHORUS)

I then made it into a small poster (two A4 sheets trimmed down, stuck together and laminated), which you can download a copy of here. 😊

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It was a little difficult to think of another, useful, separate activity to do with the shahadah... We've made it a habit for the girls to recite it in Arabic every night before sleeping, so they were pleasantly surprised to discover they already knew it! As for the English meaning, it's covered in this song... So there wasn't really much else to do lol. That level of detail is fine with us for now. 👍

Song: The Five Daily Prayers

We've always made it a point to include salah as a normal part of our lifestyle, by praying in front of the kids and inviting them to join in if they want (though there's no compulsion, they're still young, and if they want to just continue playing that's fine as long as they're reasonably quiet). Winter time is especially good as they're awake for Maghrib, usually Fajr and sometimes 'Isha too - so they can hear the prayers being recited aloud. 😊 So the girls have been aware of salah for as long as they can remember.

I decided to make them a poster just to highlight when the different prayers take place (by hand, so no download link today, I'm afraid! I like to have a mix of typed/handwritten things on display) and made up a simple song to go with it:

Fajr in the morning,
Dhuhr at midday,
'Asr in the afternooooon!
Maghrib at sunset,
'Isha in the nighttime...
That's the five daily prayers!

...I told you it was simple. Lol.

The tune is one I made up, one of those kind of random/slightly out-of-tune yet catchy melodies you hum around the house while doing chores... Not something I'm willing to record myself singing but I'm sure you could make up a simple tune yourself, if you wanted. 😜

The main points I wanted to include in the poster were:

- pictures of the sun/sky at each point in the day
- the name of each prayer
- pictures to show which prayers are loud/quiet (open/closed mouth smiley faces)
- the rough time each prayer takes place