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).
