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).

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: 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.