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. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Maths update: charts, tallying & time

Self-reference post.

Using simple explanations on the whiteboard, talking and worksheets, the twins can now:
- draw pictograms
- read bar charts
- draw bar charts
- tally
- tell the time

How long is a day?

Yr1 NC Science target: Observe and describe how day length varies

I decided to have the girls look outside at the same time every morning and evening for a couple of weeks, so they could see if the sky always looks the same - either day or night or in between - or if it changes as time passes... With the time of year being as it is, 7am and 7pm fit in perfectly as sunrise and sunset are both due to cross over the 7 o' clock mark over the next couple of weeks. This will not only let them see the daytime span shorten for themselves, but it reinforces their ability to tell the time and teaches them diligence in remembering to keep their record twice daily! They're waking up themselves around 6:30am and their bedtime is just after 7pm, so the timings work out well for us too - to do it last thing before bed and leave it out ready to fill in in the morning.

After explaining to them what the investigation was going to be, we used our Science wall display to help write a prediction. First, with some prompting, they told me all the information they already knew. Then they used this to predict what they thought would happen. Even though Twin 2's response was a lot wordier lol, they both thought the same thing - that the day length is related to the temperature! So once we have our results, this will lead on nicely to looking at seasonal changes in terms of the Earth's orbit and how we get day and night in the first place, insha'Allah. 😂

You can download our worksheet here.

Seasons-Weather Match

Our next Science topic is Seasonal Changes. They've covered many of the NC targets for Year 1 naturally just through everyday conversations, so now it's just a case of filling in the gaps.

Today's target was to "observe and describe weather associated with the seasons."

I began by simply asking the twins how many different types of weather they could think of and wrote these on the whiteboard as they said them. Next, I gave them each a sheet of paper with pictures (found from Google) to represent 9 different weather patterns on it:

I asked them which weathers on the sheet were missing from our list and gave them clues for the ones they struggled with - namely the middle one and the last two! The pictures show: sunny, raining, snowing, windy, overcast, cloudy, stormy, fog, hailing. So by the end we had all 9 words on the whiteboard. They didn't know what hail was at all, so we found some videos on YouTube to watch before continuing. The others they'd either experienced or read about in books (they remembered this Biff & Chip book from last year!).

Next, I gave them a template so they could match the weather to the season they think it happens in the most, e.g. it can be sunny all year round, but which season do they think has the most days of sunny weather? Summer! And sometimes it can snow in Spring, but which season has the most snow? Winter! So they glued the pictures in the boxes, explaining to me why they thought they went where... e.g. I told them storms are made when there's hot air so they decided to match stormy to Summer, and I told them fog is cold air so they matched it to Winter... Windy they put in Autumn because it made them think of leaves blowing around and the leaves fall off the trees in Autumn!

We also took this opportunity to revise some of the Arabic we've learnt, i.e. the season names which are on the worksheet and weather patterns which we did verbally ("the weather is good/hot/sunny/cold", "rain", "snow", "wind", "I feel hot/cold") ***EDIT TO ADD ARABIC TEXT***

You can download our worksheet here.

Understanding the clock face

We've covered telling the time to the hour and half past the hour on both analogue and digital clocks. Before moving on to quarter past/to and the intervals between, I wanted the girls to understand and be familiar with the fact each of the numbers 1-12 on the clock represents 5 minutes/seconds. Rather than simply tell them this, I thought it would stick better if they worked it out themselves!

They already knew there are 60 minutes in 1 hour from becoming familiar with digital clocks in our everyday life (e.g. the clock on the oven which we've been asking them to read since they were 3!) so I began by asking: If there are 60 minutes in an hour and it takes 1 hour for the minute hand to go all the way round the clock, how many minutes fit into each of those big numbers 1-12? Sounds like a mouthful, but not so complicated illustrated on a clock at the same time. 😂

They understood they needed to share the 60 minutes between the 12 numbers, so it was division, but they couldn't work it out in their heads! I asked them if they wanted to use the blocks to help and they said yes. 😏

I took out the numbers 1-12 from our Melissa & Doug jigsaw and asked the girls to arrange them to look like a clock... So they knew they needed to put them in a circle but it was a challenge to get it looking right lol. They started out with a triangle, then one commented the 6 needed to be in a straight line under the 12, and eventually they ended up with a wonky oval.

Next, I gave them the tub of multilink cubes and asked how many did they need to have one for each minute? 60... And what did they know about their cubes and the different colours? There are 10 of each colour... So how many colours did they need to use? 6! There are two of them, so how many colours did they need to get each? 3! MashaAllah. They put the 60 cubes in the centre of their clock.

Now for the sharing part... If they put the same amount of cubes on each number, how many cubes would each number end up with? I prompted them by saying to first try giving 1 cube to each number.

They then continued sharing out the cubes so they all had 2, then 3, then I stopped them and asked them to estimate how many more times they thought they'd be able to go round the clock... One guessed 8, the other 11. 😂 Ok. So I let them go round again then stopped them again to see if they wanted to change their estimate. They both laughed and one said she thought only one more time after this so she should have estimated 2 to begin with - then the other agreed and exclaimed she thought they were all going to end up with 5 cubes each. 👍

We equated this back to the original question: if there are 60 minutes in an hour, how many minutes are there in between each number on the clock? 5! Then we counted in 5s round the clockface to check.

Finally, I told them to look at the real clock so they could count how many seconds there are in a minute - count how many times the second moves for it to go all the way round the clock, using 12 as a starting point. I asked them if there are 60 seconds just as there are 60 minutes, how many seconds do they think are in between each number? 5! Then we counted 5 seconds between two of the numbers to check.

Later on in the day, after a break, they completed the above worksheet to consolidate what they'd learnt. Taken from both *** and *** [edit to add titles]

After a few days, one of the twins asked if it was five past six because the big hand was on the 1... I said yes. Throughout the day she kept asking if it was so-and-so past, getting it right; I asked how she knew and she said because she was counting in 5s for each number! Masha'Allah. Within the next couple of days her sister had caught on too - so now they can both tell the time to the hour, half past and x minutes past the hour. 💪