New Term

Today we restarted homeschooling after a 10 day break. I guess it really was a matter of whether we really needed to have holidays when we are not going off on a trip. Lessons are not just sit-downs where we go through the intricacies of knowledge, but where the kids learn in a fun and active way. Hence, we cut short our break by two weeks.

Ihsan started off on his Ad-Duha Islamic curriculum especially well and liked both the Quran and Arabic lessons on cd. He especially enjoyed the quiz on his Arabic programme. We had a good start and we haven't even explored the books yet. He'd love the stories on the Asma ul Husna texts and the Arabic curriculum is very clear and precise.

We are continuing with another Dinosaur theme with the kids' renewed interest in it. After outdoors we made a Dinosaur hat from the template off a Dinosaur theme pack bought off atozteachers.com. I love their packages for the different themes there and at such reasonable prices too.

When I did my lessons on Verbs, instead of naming general items, I had Ihsan name and write down on paper the names of his different dinosaur models and then asked him the different actions that dinosaurs can do.

Umayr was really taken with using chopsticks to pick up corks today. When I woke up from my afternoon nap, he was doing it by himself and even taught his sister how to do it. On starfall.com, he got to enjoy his favourite dinosaur dance song and learn letters 'd' and 'k'. For math, we counted how many dinosaurs in a row it would take to go from a point in a room to another.

He didn't want to do his readers today though. Oh well... we didn't do our lessons on ten, hundred thousands and millions for Ihsan too as he was bent on doing another activity and was tired off by the second half of the day, having not fully recovered from his fever.

Everything considered, it was a good start to the new term. Alhamdulillah. I am going to continue to concentrate on the spiritual education of my children. When they are stable spiritually, Insyaallah they'll be just fine with learning anything else.