Muslim tot-school: masjid artwork, and a question for other Muslim moms

Umm An-Nu'man over at A Muslim Child is Born has a lovely set of three downloadable templates for masjid-based art.

I picked one, shrank it down quite a bit, printed it out and laminated it, and since then we've been trying to use it. Umm An-Nu'man and her kids used paints to fill it in, but Basbusa hasn't had much practice with paint yet, and is still far too fascinated by "exploring" it to be able to use it in a real "art project." (Much more interesting to find out what happens when she sticks her fingers in it, paints her feet, mixes colors together, etc etc :)

So, we tried scribbling in it with markers, outlining it with crayons, and even putting it underneath the paper and doing "rubbings" of it. They all worked in the sense that Basbusa got the general idea, but I think she's still a bit too young for a structured project with a pre-set goal, and I don't want to do anything that might teach her to think that there's a "right" and a "wrong" way to do artwork. So, I put the template aside until she's a bit older.

But I guess something sunk in, all the same! This morning Babusa was scribbling on her magnadoodle while I finished off some work on the computer, and she suddenly said, "Mama! Masjid!"

Well, I'm sure a mother's rosy-eyed view is influencing my interpretation, but you can kind of see what she means, right? :)

And a question for other Muslim parents: have you tried - or even seen in real life - any formal Islamic Studies "curriculum"? Do your children use one in Islamic School, and if so, what do you think of it? The ones I've heard of are IQRA, ICO Islamic Studies and Goodword, but I have no idea how good they are, and there seem to be millions of other options too. Basbusa is still too young for these, but I want to start investigating the possibilities so that I have some sense of direction when she's older. I'd like something that concentrates mostly on Islamic values, using examples from the Quran, seerah and ahadith, rather than just presenting simplified versions of stories from the Quran or getting tied up in the technical details of exactly how to wash your ears in wudhuu'. I'd really appreciate any input, even if it's just, "My kids did fine without any formal curriculum," or "I have no clue either, but I heard from my friend's aunt's sister that X is no good..." Jazaakum Allahu khayr!! :)

tot school: ice-cube scooping and bead-threading

Another hit-and-miss tot-school session today, as usual!

First up, ice-cube scooping, inspired by Chasing Cheerios:

This is another one where I'm not quite sure what the point is, as far as "education" is concerned, but Basbusa certainly loved it! I added a bit of red paint to the water before freezing the ice-cubes, just to make them a bit more visible. I thought it would be tricky for her, but actually she had the icecubes transferred into the bowl in about twelve seconds using the big slotted spoon. So we tried again using a teeny-weeny teaspoon. Done in maybe 20 seconds, followed by several repetitions. But she enjoyed it a lot, and I think she was also interested in the coldness of the icecubes (which she has never really played with before) and the way the changed shape and dripped pink water as they melted. So hey, let's call it a science experiment :)

And, yet another fail in the beading department:

(Please note, when I say "fail," I don't mean Basbusa!! I mean failure on *my* part to come up with activities that she finds fun and interesting.) A nice, easily-grippable new shoelace, and some beads that fell off a broken abacus. Fun threading activity, you'd think, right? But no; Basbusa, who finds nothing more interesting than inserting flash drives into USB ports and cell-phone-chargers into cell-phones, apparently thinks that putting a shoelace through a bead is a waste of time. No interest whatsoever. Maybe she'd be more into it if we were "making necklaces"? Get some pink and sparkle involved? She does seem to have inherited (from her Auntie, not from her Mama!) a love of girlie bows and ribbons... Hmmmm....

tot school: number-recognition and pom-pom placing

Please note: I link to TotSchool once a week, but I actually post our activities one day at a time rather than in a weekly wrap-up. You can see all our Tot School posts by clicking on the "Tot School" link on the right.

Apologies for the long silence! Work always gets crazy at the end of the quarter, so blog-updates fell by the wayside for a while there.

This tot-school session was our usual mix of successful with giant flop. It's odd; Basbusa has been picking up new (Arabic) letters in the blink of an eye, but with numbers, which she sees much more often in the world around her, recognition has been coming much more slowly. Zero, one and six are still the only ones she has completely down, with a few others possible depending on the day. It's lucky we live in an apartment building, or even one and six would probably still be pretty vague! Yay for the joys of elevator-button-pressing :)

So our first activity was to get some use out of the vast number of supermarket fliers that arrive in our mailbox every Thursday:

Lots of pictures of food, which Basbusa always likes to talk about! And numbers of all kinds sprinkled around the page. In the example above, which is the first time we tried it, she was finding the "3"s and I was circling them, and then she found the "9"s and I put a rectangle around them etc, but she wasn't too enthralled, and needed a lot of encouragement and prompting. Since then, however, we've evolved a bit: Now she gets to hold the pen, and we put "stars" (in other words, enthusiastic scribbles) on whichever number we're looking for . We also mix it up a bit by putting stars on the strawberries, or on the noses of the models in clothes-store ads, or on the letter "S"s (the only one she knows so far in English), and she's much more interested. We've had fun with this quite a few times.

Next up: using a teaspoon to put pom-poms into a little tray which used to line a box of chocolates.

Why? Well, I'm not quite sure. The entire tot-school universe and its mother seems to do this kind of thing, whether it's using tweezers to put erasers into egg-cups or using tongs to put marbles onto upside-down bath-sucker-thingies, so I'm sure there must be a good reason behind it. One-to-one correspondence, maybe? Fine motor skills and finger-strength? Their kids also seem to love it, so I thought we'd give it a try, but it didn't really work out. First of all, Basbusa, lover of all things pink, picked out all the pink pom-poms and spent quite a while trying to cram them all into her pocket. She was momentarily intrigued when I started putting one pom-pom into each spot on the tray, but clearly thought it was silly to be using a spoon when fingers were so much easier, and soon lost interest anyway. I held her attention for a few seconds longer by engaging her love of giving orders and letting her dictate which spot I'd put each pom-pom - I figured that if the point is one-to-one correspondence, she'd still be getting some use out of it this way - but we were done pretty quickly. Ah well. Whatever the point was, I don't think we got it!

To see what everyone else and their tots have been up to this week, please check out Tot School headquarters over at 1+1+1=1.

tot school: bears and puzzles

[Please note: I put the official "tot school" logo on one post per week, but actually, I don't do a weekly compilation of all our tot-school activities - I cover one tot-school day in each post, and upload them as we go. If you'd like to see more of our tot-school days, you can click on the "tot school" link on the right.]

Basbusa was still not 100% over her virus during today's tot school, but all the same, I think the activities I had planned for her didn't really catch her interest. Remember these bears, whom I had been hoping she might sort a few weeks ago? Well, now that she really does know her colors - well, most of them - I thought we'd have another try. And sure enough, while I was setting things up, she did hunt around for a few blue bears and put them in the blue cup without my even suggesting it. But the activity itself wasn't much of a hit. Here's what I had been planning:

I took a big green foam dice (two for a dollar at Dollar Tree), covered the faces with white labels, and colored them yellow, red and blue. Then I got out the red, blue and yellow bears and cups. I had been thinking we could incorporate plenty of running around: we'd put the cups in three different corners of the room with the bears in the middle, toss the dice, pick out a bear that matched the color on the dice, and then run-run-run to the matching cup to put the bear in it. Sounds fun, right? I thought so, but Basbusa wasn't convinced. She got the idea, and understood that she was supposed to pick out a bear that matched the dice, but she didn't seem to think it was a very fun thing to do. And as for going to put it in a cup, well, she saw even less point in that. She did maybe four or five, with much encouragement, and then was all done. She put the yellow dice into the yellow cup and got up and wandered off.

Right. Well, next up were some puzzles. Basbusa has yet to put even so much as one piece into a single puzzle, and I've tried all kinds - those big knobbed ones, ones like the ones below, and even super-simple ones like pictures of animals just cut in two with a straight line, so all you're really doing is matching the heads to the tails. She has no interest in any of them. I keep reading about tots all over the blogosphere who thrive on puzzles, so I thought I'd keep offering them once every so often just in case she changes her mind. So I brought out these (a set of 8 for $4 at the Christmas Tree Stores):

As usual, she had no interest in putting them together, and only mild interest in taking them apart. She did enjoy mixing up the pieces from several different puzzles, like this:

... and then fishing out the three parts of the pig, or the three parts of the cow, but actually assembling those three parts was not on her agenda. Ah well.

Our last activity was just playing, really, with a bit of discussion of colors and clothing thrown in. I made this felt dress-up bear for Basbusa as an activity to keep her busy on the plane for our last trip to Egypt, but she was still a bit young for it then. She enjoyed it for a few minutes this time, but kept wanting to pick up the bear after dressing her, and was discouraged by how the bear just flopped (I've since glued her onto a cardboard backing to make her a bit more robust). So this was yet another not-so-successful activity. Zero for three in tot school today! Oh well. Better luck next time, insha'Allah.

To see what everyone else is up to in tot school this week, please check out the Linky over at Carissa's 1+1+1=1.

tot school: introducing the Glue Stick

Today's tot school was a bit of a failure, really, but that's most likely because Basbusa has been miserably sick with a virus for the past few days. I thought she might like a bit of very-low-key crafting while her fever was down, but she just shook her head miserably when I tried to hand her bits of paper, and said, "Mama do it." She even shook her head at her beloved scissors and just snuggled on my lap instead, whereas usually she likes nothing better than chopping up strips of paper.

So, the following crafts are all me, not Basbusa. I persevered even though she was just watching me, because I had an Ulterior Motive: I'm hoping to start making an Arabic Alphabet picture book with her soon, with lots of pictures for each letter for her to glue onto each sheet, so I wanted to introduce her to glue sticks and how they work. We (well, I) made this:

using her two current favorite colors, pink and black, with a few bits of orange thrown in. She wouldn't hold the glue stick at first, but eventually, after watching me use it, she picked up a second one, wound it up and down a few times, and then started scooping bits of glue out of it with her fingernail, and smearing it on the paper. Well, that works too, I guess! She did enjoy doing a bit of "I Spy" with it afterwards, looking for the hearts and the circle among all the random shapes, but that was about it.

So we moved on to this (hideously ugly) little guy:

Know what it's supposed to be? Basbusa did, much to my astonishment! As soon as I had the eyes glued on, she said "Owl! Owl!" and was all excited. I chose him just for a bit more glue-stick practice, and also because her favorite book in the universe is still Owl Babies, so anything owl-related is usually a hit.

So, I'm not sure how much of the whole gluing process really sunk in, but hopefully she picked up some kind of idea. We might have one more try before we move on to making her alphabet book.

Tot school: bear-sorting and number puzzle

So today was yet another day where I was fumbling cluelessly, with no clue how to find the line between playing-and-exploring with a tiny bit of guidance (good), and pushing-and-instructing (bad).

We started out with the Counting Bears ($1 at the dollar store, that wonderful source of cheap tot-school delights). Basbusa loves these guys, because they make a lovely clattering sound when she pours them from cup to cup. When we've used them before, I had plans to try some color sorting, so only put two colors out, but all three times, the joys of bear-pouring completely eclipsed all other possibilities. So this time around, I decided to just go with the flow (of bears), and just let her go nuts with the pouring, while chatting with her about colors a bit as she did it.



Bears were poured back and forth, with much delightful clattering. And then she put a yellow bear in a cup, hunted around a bit, found a second yellow bear, and put it beside the first one. Hmmmm... Spontaneous sorting? Or complete coincidence? I had no clue, but I thought I'd see if we could keep going a bit. So asked if she could find me another yellow one. She did, but wanted to put him in a different cup.

From here on, I'm not sure if I took the right direction or not. I got a bit more involved in giving directions, encouraging her towards the cup we were sorting into when she had found a yellow bear, and, when she picked one of another color, saying something along the lines of "oh look, a red bear! How pretty. But let's not put him in with the yellow ones. Look, see how he's a different color?"

So, here's what we ended up with:

All the yellow bears in the purple cup. Is this a picture of a successful learning experience? Or of childhood exploration being squashed by a narrow-minded, pushy mother? I don't know. I'm sure she's not warped for life - yet - but I wish I had more clue what I'm doing. At least it was good pouring practice, until Mama decided to stick her big nose in.

Next up was her number puzzle.

This is another one where I don't know what I'm doing. So far, she hasn't gotten the hang of puzzles. She can get the pieces close-ish to where they're supposed to be, but she doesn't know how to put them in place, and isn't very interested in trying. With this puzzle in particular, though, we have a game she likes: I sing the chorus of her favorite number-song in Arabic, pointing to each number as I sing it. She steals a number, and then when I get to that point in the song, I make a big deal of being surprised and astonished and confused that I can't go on with my singing. Much giggling ensues, and it gives me plenty of chances to repeat things like, "... six, seven - oh no! where's the 8? where did the 8 go? here's the place for the 8, right here, but the 8 is gone!"

Sometimes I go on to, "Basbusa, do you think you could put that 8 back in it's place? So I could keep singing my nice song?" She makes an attempt, but isn't that interested, so I usually leave it at that. I don't think she gets the point, and it seems silly to go through motions that are meaningless to her.

So, maybe my baby just hasn't gotten to the "puzzles" stage of development yet, or maybe I'm failing to endow her with puzzle-solving skills. Anyone know?

Tot school: (non)sorting and some engineering

My "official" tot school session wasn't really very successful today. Or maybe I should say, it didn't go as I had been planning. I hadn't even been planning to have it at all today, actually, but Basbusa spotted the materials I had been planning to use for sorting, and wanted to play with them. When I said that we wouldn't play with those now, but we would the next time we did "school," she ran to our tot-school-corner and started tugging on the mat we spread out during "school time." So ok, I guess "school time" just arrived :)

It didn't work out phenominally well, though. I was using a kind of mini-peg-board thing that that my husband picked up at a flea market. Basbusa has played with it several times before, sometimes just with pegs to put in and take out, and sometimes with elastic bands for looping around the pegs, but she hasn't been wild about it either way (read: lost interest after about 30 seconds).

This time, I was hoping we could put all the blue pegs in one board, and all the red ones in another. Basbusa had no interest whatsoever in this plan. So far, she has had the same reaction to any sorting activity, no matter how appealing the materials. I don't really understand it, because she does seem to get the concept in other contexts - she can pick all the peas out of a veggie mix with no problem, so as to avoid eating any corn, for example. (That's "sorting," right?) But when it's a goal for its own sake, she either doesn't get what I'm talking about, or else has some objection to doing it, I'm not sure which. Maybe she just doesn't see the point?

So, complete failure of the sorting activity. On the other hand, she spent a total of about 40 minutes playing with these "toys":

A padlock and a mini-screwdriver set (I think it's supposed to be an eyeglass repair kit). She spent forever practicing putting the key in the lock and taking it out again, and then opening and trying (unsuccessfully) to close the padlock itself. The screwdriver set has five teeny-weeny little heads, which she took out of their holders and replaced about five thousand times, before figuring out that they could each be inserted into the screwdriver-handle, opening up a whole new world of putting-in-and-taking-out.

So, I'm calling this one practice for fine-motor skills, and an introduction to engineering :)

Tot-school: cheerio beading and rice pouring

Yesterday we started off with a (cheapskate) version of beading: cheerios on a (new) shoelace.

I'd seen many varieties of beading activities on other blogs, which all seemed to go well. Basbusa loves cheerios, and is a huge fan of plugging cell-phone-chargers into cell phones or computer-headphones into computers, so she should love this one, right? Well..... not so much, it turns out. She put a few cheerios onto the lace, and was quite enthusiastic about taking the cheerios off the lace again, when I did a few demo-beadings, but it wasn't long before she was pointing to all her favorite animals on the alphabet chart and feeding them cheerios instead. "Llama! eat! nom-nom-nom-nom... Donkey!! ee-awwww, ee-awww.... eat! Donkey! nom-nom-nom."

Once the animal alphabet chart had had its fill of cheerios, she pointed up to where I had ever-so-sneakily hidden activity number two (note to self: be sneakier in future), and said, "Rice!" Ohhhhkay then. Rice it is.

We've done this one once before. Again, I was envisioning all kinds of pouring and scooping activities the first time I tried it, inspired by blogs everywhere, so I had collected a variety of spoons and scoopy-things and cups. Result? Confusion. Basbusa was keen on investigating the rice, but all the scoopers and stirrers seemed to get in the way of whatever plans she had in her little head. I was sure, at the very least, that she'd enjoy learning how to scoop up a big cupful of rice and pour it back into the bowl again; but no, what she wanted was to use her hands to transfer rice from the big bowl into a smaller one.

So this time, I was smarter: we had a big bowl containing just rice and one little bowl. She loved it! And it was fascinating to watch how many things she learned just with those simple tools. She spent the first ten minutes or so just transfering rice again, finding out what kind of hand and finger-motions worked best for picking it up and carrying it, and which worked best for pouring it out again. (I'd never noticed - the sound of rice falling quickly is actually quite different from the sound of rice falling a few grains at a time.) And what worked best for the little bowl? Holding it in her other hand? Putting it inside the big bowl (my favorite)? Putting it on the floor beside her (her favorite - me, not so much... rice everywhere...)?

Then she noticed that the big bowl actually has pictures of fruit on the bottom, and that by pushing the rice aside she could see them. Much excited excavation followed, with rice flying around her ears. Uh-oh, Basbusa! Just a moment, sit over here for a minute; we'd better do some picking-up. "NO!!! No-no-no! NO! Rice! Rice!!! No!!!!" *

Play resumed after we had had a discussion about having to pick up the rice first, and that we'd be playing with the rice again afterwards. This sequence of events seemed to make a big impression, because she was being much more careful when she got back to her rice-excavation, trying out different motions to see how she could toss the rice around without letting it fall outside of the bowl.

So, a successful session overall, I think? Don't know what went wrong with the cheerios, but I'll give it another try in a few days. And the finding-things-in-rice seems to have been a big hit - maybe I should try one of these I-Spy bottles that are showing up all over the tot-school blogosphere?

* Note - we only speak Arabic with Basbusa, and so far, that's all she speaks (except, mysteriously, for the word "no", which she says in English every single time). So the conversations reported here are translations, not the originals :)