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. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

The National Space Centre

We visited The National Space Centre in Leicester as part of our topic on the seasons. Since Leicester is relatively near to Birmingham, we ended up purchasing a year pass as going at least twice means any additional visits work out as being "free". So with the view of visiting again later, we focused just on the exhibits relevant to our topic or the solar system in general.

Some of the things we saw, amongst many others:

A mechanical representation of the Earth orbiting the sun and the moon orbiting the Earth.

A rotating model to show the reason we have day and night.

Part of the Solar System gallery, with each planet having its own themed section to walk through and explore.

The actual Mars Rover scheduled to be sent to Mars, insha'Allah!

Overall, the trip was a really good experience for the girls in consolidating their knowledge and opening up opportunities for more questions. 👍

Planting Tulips

My parents gave us some tulip bulbs as a souvenir from their mini break to Amsterdam. There were 8 bulbs in the pack, and we had 4 pots (one for each girl!), so the twins worked out they could plant 2 bulbs in each pot... They could do their own, and Mama could plant the baby's for her. 😁

The twins had gardening gloves (bought last year!) whilst the toddler didn't... So the former used their hands to put the compost in whilst the latter used a trowel - and we reused the compost from the dwarf beans we had planted in the Summer. The girls, MashaAllah, remembered which way up to plant the bulbs from their time at the allotments and knew how to half fill the pot with compost, make a well for the bulbs to go inside root way down, then cover them up with more compost.

When they were done, I arranged the pots in age order (left to right) against the fence which gets most sun in the garden. Insha'Allah they'll bloom in the Spring without any more work from us!

Whilst in the garden (we've not played in it since the end of Summer, really) we noticed some sunflowers had grown in the grass! We planted sunflowers last February and really looked after them - watering them daily and weeding the area around them on a consistent basis. The sunflowers which grew last year were taller than the fence, MashaAllah! And the girls were really proud of them. 🌻🌻 We didn't plant any this year since our youngest was born in July, yet somehow some sunflowers had grown... How? The girls worked out some seeds must have fallen from our old plants and planted themselves in the soil! When the shoots and leaves grew in Autumn, they looked familiar... So we asked Papa to mow around them when he did the grass. Now it was almost Winter they had finally grown heads and we were right to have guessed they might have been sunflowers! But these sunflowers were nowhere near the size of our old ones... Why? Because we didn't look after them! So this was a good lesson in the importance of weeding and watering. 👌

They did actually bloom not long after, but I forgot to take any photos of them before they died. 🙈

Learning about Weight

So we'd already looked at grams in the context of making gingerbread men and kg in the context of their own weight, looked at different objects around the house in order to estimate then weigh them, ordered different objects from heaviest to lightest...

I had this worksheet already photocopied but I'd been putting off giving it to the girls to complete because I thought they would need lots of help and the baby needed a lot of attention at the time. So when I eventually gave them the sheet, I was surprised yet pleased to find out they were able to complete it independently! MashaAllah! 😍😍 I literally gave it to them to read through while I went to do something (maybe change the baby's nappy?) and when I came back they were halfway through. Lol. 😂 Shows I need to challenge them more!!

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" 👍

Everyone's Skin is the Same!

Focusing in on one aspect of Prophet Adam (AS)'s story, I wanted the girls to understand  that everyone is essentially the same colour when it comes to their skin, we're all just a variety of different shades... Without mentioning the word "racism" at all, but sowing the seeds of understanding there.

So we recapped the part of the story of when Allah created Adam (AS) by collecting mud/clay from all over the Earth and went on to discuss how the climates differ around the world and how everyone looks different, i.e. hair colour, eye colour and skin colour... So we all look different, but how do we all look the same? I told them that essentially, everyone in the world is just different shades of brown. They laughed at this. 😂 Then we got the paints out (tell me which colours mix to make brown? And which colours can we use to make that brown darker or lighter?) and mixed a brown into the centre of one of the palletes. Then with their own separate mixing palletes, they had a go mixing different amounts of the starting brown with different amounts of black/white/red/green/yellow/blue to see which different shades they could make. With each different brown they made, they painted a circle, i.e. a face, on a sheet of plain A4 card.

This is essentially the basics of understanding melanin! They tried their best to paint someone Caucasian but found it hard to limit the amount of brown on their brushes... In the end one commented, "It's hard to get it light enough so they must only have a tiny little bit of brown in their skin!" 👌

Then they painted hair on their people and we talked about the different colours of natural hair in the world.

In the end, people are all people no matter how they look like! And in the end, it's our actions which are the most important, not what we look like anyway. 👍

Why does the day length change?

Following on from our earlier post, we completed the table and wrote up our results - based on knowledge they'd picked up in the meantime from books and discussions...

So even though their predictions were correct - the days, i.e. hours of daylight, became shorter - their reason to do with temperature wasn't correct. So to encourage scientific thinking, we took this experiment further by deciding to measure the temperature over the next week and see if it's also getting colder. (Hopefully there'll be some fluctuation rather than a continuous drop! But if not, it'll just lead to another discussion so it's all good. 😁) I was pleased the girls understood that because they know for definite the days are getting shorter, if the reason for their prediction was correct then the temperature will be colder each day too... If the temperature goes up and the day length doesn't get longer then it means temperature isn't the cause! And when I say understood, I just had to ask, "What should happen to the temperature each day if the day length only gets shorter because it's colder and longer when it's hotter?" and they just went ahead and explained the above to me themselves. 👍 Masha'Allah!

We bought a couple of ethanol thermometers from Amazon for the girls to use. They simply needed to stand in the garden at around the same time each day (depending on our schedule!) and then record it on the poster. Using the thermometers was a good experience too: practising reading scales, an awareness of negative numbers, knowing the bulb end is the part which measures so to make sure to hold it from the middle/other end, that it takes a little time for the red line to move so they need to wait before reading it. I've explained it simply that when it's hot the liquid inside the red line gets bigger and when it's cold the liquid shrink - which they seem happy enough with for now! 👌

So from our results, they came to the conclusion that the temperature getting colder definitely wasn't the reason for the day length decreasing as the season changes from Summer to Winter - because, look! The temperature went up and down each day but the day length was always getting shorter!