Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (4)

For the last week of our preschool "Ramadan Club," we had waaaaaay too many letters left to cover: ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي. But we gave it a try anyway :) I only have two new games to share this time, because some of the others were repeats from previous weeks, and not all of my new game ideas were as popular with the kids as I had hoped.

Wow!! 
- This wasn't really a stand-alone game. I just wrote a big letter و on a piece of cardboard and taped it to a stick. Throughout the class whenever anyone got something right or did something well, I waved it around and everyone yelled out, "wow!!" :)

Playdoh letter-building circle

• I pre-rolled some long playdoh "snakes" and dots, because I didn't want the kids to get too distracted by the fun of playing with playdoh during class.
• I gave each kid a paper plate, a snake, and two dots, and asked them to sit on the floor in a circle.
• Then I asked the kids to use their snake-and-dots to build me a ف on their paper plate.
• When everyone was done, I asked them to pass the plates to the person on the right, and change the letter they received into a ق.
• And so on, changing back and forth from ف to ق, as I gradually sped up how fast I called out the letters and how fast they had to pass the plates around the circle.
• Sometimes I'd try to trick them by calling out the name of the letter they already had, rather than the opposite one. 

I was trying to get them to remember that the difference between the two letters is that the ق has two dots and a "deeper" tail, whereas the ف has just one dot and a "flatter" tail.

Sand-Tray Letter Writing

• To help the kids learn ك and ل, I wrote the two letters side by side on a big piece of paper, and we talked about how their shapes were similar and different.
• Then I set up three trays with about half an inch of sand in them, and a copy of the two letters right in front of each tray.
• The kids took turns to use their fingers to "write" the letters in the sand.

It sounds pretty simple but the kids liked it a lot, and kept asking for more turns. This is a Montessori-based idea, and the theory is that the kids get two kinds of reinforcement at the same time: the see the shape with their eyes, and they feel the shape (and the motion of making it) with their finger. Hint: to save your floor, put a tablecloth or something under the trays of sand!

For more in this series of posts, please see
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (1) ,
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (2) and
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3).

Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3)

We had a bunch of letters to cover this week in our preschool "Ramadan Club": س, ش, ص, ض, ط, ظ, ع and غ. We started with a review of the letters we covered in the first two weeks:

Letter Stepping-Stones:

• I got out our foam letters and pulled out letters ا through ز.
• I spread them out in a row, spaced jumping-distance apart.
• The kids lined up and took turns to jump down the row, saying the name of each letter before they landed. (In the end, everyone ended calling out the letters together, for each of the jumpers, which worked even better. More practice for everybody, and helpful for the kids who weren't so sure of all the letters.)
• Then we moved on to hopping down the row instead of jumping.

The kids were really enjoying it so we could definitely have kept on going with other kinds of jumps, but since it was only review, I wanted to move on to the new letters of the day. 

Build-A-Letter:

• For each kid, I made a set of letter parts like this (you can click to make it bigger, and then print it):

• Then I wrote one of our eight new letters on the board, repeated its name and asked the kids to build me one like it.

That's it. Simple, but the kids liked it, and it gave me lots of opportunities to repeat the name of the letter over and over again while the kids were focused on the corresponding letter-shapes. 

Dot-Jumping:

We seem to do a lot of jumping in these games, I know! 

• I wrote our eight new letters on the board, and had the kids crouch down on the floor like frogs.
• If I called out a letter that has a dot (or dots), the kids had to jump up in the air as high as they could. If I called out a letter with no dot, they had to stay still. 
• In the beginning, I helped out by pointing to the letter as I said it, and then moved on to saying the letter without giving them hints.
• They were really enjoying the jumping, so in the end we had them jump three times for three-dot letter, once for one-dot letters, and not at all for no-dot letters.

Al7amdulillah, the kids had fun, and ended up with at least a basic grasp of the new letters. Eight new letters for a bunch of four-and-five-year-olds in twenty minutes is really too much, no matter how much fun you make it, but we're trying to get through the whole alphabet during Ramadan insha'Allah.

For more in this series of posts, please see
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (1),
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (2) and
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3).

Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (2)

I have two more games to suggest from our "Ramadan Club" last week, when we covered the letters ج, ح, خ, د, ذ, ر and ز.

Add-The-Dot Race:
We did this with ج, ح and خ, but you could use any group of letters that look the same except for the dots.

• We divided the kids into three groups at one end of the room, and gave each group a piece of chalk. 
• I set up a big chalk-board at the front of the room, and wrote three big ح 's on it (one for each group).
• When I called out a letter (ح, ج or خ), the kids were supposed to discuss where to put the dot, have one person run up to the chalkboard and put the dot in the right place, run back to their group again and yell out the name of the letter when they arrived. (If I had called out a ح, they just tapped the chalkboard without writing any dot.) 
• The group whose runner arrived back first won the race.

In reality, the kids didn't really discuss where to put the dot - whoever was holding the chalk just ran. I had been hoping they'd discuss it partly because our group is uneven in terms of how well the kids know their letters, so I didn't want some kids always getting it "right" while others always got it "wrong", and partly because I was hoping that they'd reinforce each other's knowledge by using the letter names in their discussion of where to put the dots. But never mind :) 

Bingo:

• I made this bingo sheet with the letters د, ذ, ر and ز.
• I wrote the letters on four balls (but you could use pieces of paper, or anything else) and put them in a bucket.
• I pulled out one ball at a time, held it up and said its name, and the kids had to find a matching letter on their sheets (each letter appears many times) and put an "X" through it.
• First person to get a complete row of X's wins. 

For more in this series of posts, please see
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (1),
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3) and
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (4).

Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (1)

Some friends and I are running a "Ramadan Club" for our preschoolers, meeting for two hours once a week. We do a little bit of Quran memorization (we're aiming to finish Surat al Qadr by the end of the month isA), a little bit of Ramadan-related seerah, and a little bit of Arabic ABC's. We're splitting up the "teaching" between three of the moms, and I'm in charge of the ABC's part. Just in case they're of use to anyone, here are the games we used last week, when we covered ا,  ب, ت and ث :

Jump-On-the-Letter Tag:

• I wrote the letters ب,  ت,   and ث on separate pieces of paper, the same number of copies as we had kids. 
• Then I stuck them all randomly to the floor, spread out a bit so the kids wouldn't be too close together. 
• I made one copy of an ا for myself. 
• Then I called out letters, and the kids had to run to jump on the letter I had named. 
• But since I was the only person with an ا , when I called ا, the kids all had to run after me and try to tag me. 

Musical Mugs:

• I put a mug on the floor for each kid, arranged in a big circle.
• The kids each had a set of flashcards with ا,  ب, ت and ث on them.
• I played the alphabet song in Arabic while the kids skipped around in a circle (well, more or less).
• When the music stopped, I called out a letter, and the kids had to race to the nearest mug, find the right flashcard, put it in their mug, wave their mug in the air and call out the letter. 

Pipe-cleaner ABCs:

• I put the kids into pairs (just so that kids who weren't too sure of their letters would have a buddy to guide them), and gave each pair a bunch of pipe-cleaners.
• I called out a letter and they had to work together to make it out of their pipe-cleaners. 

All three games went pretty well, but the first one was probably the one they liked best.


For more in this series of posts, please see
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (2),
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3) and
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (4).

tot school: Arabic alphabet puzzle

Parents of kids learning the alphabet in English might not appreciate how overjoyed I was to find this toy/puzzle for sale for only $15 at an Islamic bookfair near our house last week!

You can pick up similar things in English at any dollar store, but Arabic is a whole other story. I'd seen these online in several places, but the only size that seemed to be in stock anywhere was the large size, with 12"x12" squares, for the insanely ridiculous price of $40. So, I had pretty much given up and stopped looking. But the ones on sale at the bookfair were 6"x6" - a much more manageable size for a toddler in any case - and although $15 is still ridiculous since they probably cost about $0.10 to manufacture, I still snapped one up.

And Basbusa loves it! Her new puzzle-doing skills transferred right over to these mats, and she also loves that you can use the squares to build cubes, towers and "houses" as well as just lying them flat on the floor. I pulled out only the eleven letters she already knows, and I'll add to them as she learns new ones (so that she knows which way up they're "supposed" to go and doesn't accidentally confuse herself by getting used to seeing them upside-down or sideways).

And another bonus: dip them in water, and they stick to the wall!
Basbusa was thrilled, and spent way longer than I expected trying to get all the dots in just the right places beside their letters. Lots of fun!

It looks like these things are now back in stock online, too! NoorArt has them here, and they also have a cheaper, smaller version (4"x4" squares) for $9.

tot school: Arabic words!

One thing that I've been - well, not *worried* about, but very aware of - for a while now is that Basbusa just doesn't see much Arabic writing in the world around her. We only have four books in Arabic (we have a few more stored away for later, but they're not really toddler-oriented), and a flimsy Egyptian kindergarten alphabet book. Basbusa sees Arabic when we're memorizing Quran together, but that's about it.

All those easy activities you can incorporate into daily life if you're teaching your child the English alphabet are just not available while we're living in the US: there are no Arabic street-signs, store names, advertisements on buses, labels on grocery shelves, etc. And particularly since Arabic script looks so different from the stand-alone Arabic letters which we've been learning, it seems all the more important that Basbusa would just have some general exposure to what writing "looks like."

So, when some friends gave us a whiteboard that their daughters had outgrown, but which is still too tall for Basbusa to use comfortably, I thought I'd use it to add a tiny bit of random Arabic script into our environment:

I change the words on it every so often, although "Allah" is usually up on top. (For non-Arabic-speakers, it currently says "Allah," "Mama" and "Baba," as well as Basbusa's real name, whited-out for the purposes of the blog :) My goal with this is definitely not to try to push her into reading! I'm in no rush at all about that. She's usually watching while I change the words, and I tell her what each one says, but that's it. We don't dwell on them or study them or really pay them any attention at all - they're just part of the environment. I'd just like her to have the opportunity to become aware that there's something called "writing" and that this, more or less, is what it tends to look like. It's an awareness that I'm sure she'd gain without any effort at all if we were working in English, just from seeing words all around her.

So imagine my surprise (and delight! and huge fountains of maternal pride and goofiness! and calls to the grandparents!) when it turned out that Basbusa had actually picked up on every single word I've ever written up there? The other day, she brought me her magnadoodle and said, "write something! write something!" She uses "write" for both writing and drawing, and what she almost always wants is a picture of a cat, but this time, just for the heck of it, I wrote her name. "Basbusa!", she cried, pointing to herself. What?!? Really?!? So I went through all the other words that have been up there, and she called out "Allah! Baba! Mama! Basbusa!" (couldn't resist throwing her name in again!), and even her best friend's nickname, "Raspberry!", which was only up there once, ages ago, for only a few days. She wasn't even stopping to think about them.

Of course she's not really reading; she has just memorized what those particular words look like, but you can just imagine how proud of her I was!

arabic printables: س picture-book page

Basbusa and I finally started a project which has been in my mind for months and months! You know how there are lots of board-books in English which just have a bunch of nice pictures for words that start with A, and then a bunch of nice pictures for words that start with B, etc? I've searched high and low for something like that in Arabic, because Basbusa loves those kind of books (even at the ripe old age of one and a half), but the closest I've been able to find is My Arabic Alphabet Book. It's nice, but there's only one picture per letter. And also, it uses fuS7a - so, for example, for the letter س, it has a car. Ok, س is for سيارة, but we're Egyptian, so we say عربية for "car." I think that would make it harder for Basbusa to get the link between the sound and the picture.

So, we're making our own. With help from Basbusa in the pasting and sticking, we put together the first page of our own Arabic Alphabet book:

I've uploaded the file here if anyone would like to print it out. There's one page with just the letter س, one page with the pictures, and one page with the words for each picture. You cut out the pictures and words, and add them (collage-style) to the page with the big س on it. I also laminated it when we were done, to make it a bit sturdier, and because Basbusa sees anything stuck to anything else as an invitation to pick, peel, pick, peel until she has it completely disassembled.

The reason I didn't just assemble all the words and images onto one sheet before printing, and avoid the work of the collage-making, was partly that I only have Microsoft Word to work with. I've always found it annoying and time-consuming trying to get Word to display images and text together without doing odd things to the placement. Also, I was hoping that if Basbusa had helped to make the book, she'd be even more interested in reading it. We'll see, insha'Allah :)

The file I've uploaded is slightly different from the one in the photo above. We know a little girl whose name starts with س, so I included her picture on our copy, but I replaced her with something else on the copy I'm sharing with the world in general. Hope this is useful to someone, insha'Allah!

tot school update: woo-hoo! flower-letter sorting!

Remember this post, where I bemoaned Basbusa's tremendous disinterest in my lovingly-made flower-letter sorting game? Well, today she caught sight of it on top of the dresser, and asked to play it. Ten whole minutes of very enthusiastic letter-matching! With all the right sounds! And just the kind of chat that I had been hoping for about sounds and matches!

She loved it. My sweet little angel munchkin.

tot school: alpha-fishing and caterpillar-making

Today's main tot-school activity was another one of those where the time, effort, and dreamy-eyed imaginings on my part far outweighed the amount of value Basbusa actually got out of it! The basic idea was to make some flashcards with the letters she knows on them, attach paperclips to each card, and then go fishing for them with a magnet on a string. Like so:

I was imagining all kinds of excited conversations along the lines of, "ooooh, look, you caught something! What is it? Yes, you're right, it looks like a sssssssss! It is, it's a red ssssssssssssss!" It kind-of worked, for eight cards, as in these photos:

("ooooooooo! oooooooooooo!" and "g!", said Basbusa), but after eight cards she was all done with the game, with a very definite "been there, done that!" air.

Why, exactly, did I think it was so important to glue on letters that I had cut out of craft foam, in three different colors, rather than just writing the letters with a pen?! There was some logic to it at the time, I swear, but I no longer have the slightest recollection what it might have been. In retrospect, in the light of all the tracing, cutting and gluing I did, and the four-minute activity length, "mild insanity" seems like the best guess.

Next up was an activity which I found here, to go along with one of Basbusa's current favorite books, The Hungry Caterpillar. Here's what we ended up with:

I drew the face, and cut the big green strips. Basbusa did all the tape-pulling, tape-tearing, and tape-trimming with the scissors (when four miles of tape ended up stuck to each link of the caterpillar). She loves both scissors and tape, and she understood the connection between the book and the finished product, so she enjoyed the activity. Plus, since the whole craft took only about five minutes at most, we could easily finish it before her attention-span ran out. Mr. Caterpillar survived as a toy for another day or too, before ending up in a sad crumple on the bathroom floor.

tot school: flower-letter matching and do-a-dot letters

Look at the pretty activity sheet I made for Basbusa as a review of the five letters she knows so far!

Isn't it colorful? The idea was that she would take the little circles with the letters on them, and match them up to the corresponding flower-middles. The letters and flowers were helpfully color-coded, too, in case she needed any extra hints. It took me a while a billion hours to put together, what with finding a good image of flowers, adding the Arabic letters, printing it, coloring it, laminating it, and cutting out the letter-circles. But I was all excited about how much fun we'd have (and, of course, about how proud of her I'd be when she got the hang of it - sounds like I need to re-read my goal statement yet again), so I didn't mind.

And the outcome? Well. On the bright side, she got the idea right away, and immediately matched up two circles with their flowers (while saying the correct sound). On the less-bright side, two circles is all she did. Then she flicked her hand airily in the manner of a monarch dismissing some poor wretch from his presence, and said, with great finality, "بح" (Egyptian baby-speak for "all done!" or "no more!"). Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Well, so much for that brilliant idea! I've uploaded the files here in case your tot is any more receptive (the sheet covers س, ب, غ, و and ج).

Next up (this wasn't actually in the same session, but in the following one, to avoid aliph-ba overload), we used round magnets to fill in the dots on giant letters:

(Please excuse shockingly filthy-looking baking sheet. It's not really filthy, just prehistorically ancient.) Being a cheapskate, as usual, I had also opted not to fork out the $15 or so for a set of real magnets like these ones, so instead I bought a $3 pack of magnetic "paper" and cut some circles out of them.

How did it go? Well, not bad. Basbusa got the idea, and we had plenty of opportunities to talk about the "g" and the "gh" (I'm doing sounds rather than letter names), and to discuss green versus red. And I guess it was good for fine motor skills, putting the magnet onto a dot? We got this far...

.... until she came up with a much more interesting use for the dots:

"g" and "gh" might be mildly entertaining, but clearly they can't hold a candle to the joys of sticking things between your toes.