Back to full swing

The past two weeks I have been able to concentrate on my kids as I have stopped teaching my neighbour's kids and won't continue next year too. It's nice to get back to the rhythm we were building before Ummi was itching to try some things other than homeschooling: )

I have been able to finish 95% of the things planned, alhamdulillah. I pray that Allah will always give us the rizki to continue our homeschooling despite whatever the frontpage of the newspapers say everyday.

Last week started with a Raya gathering at my junior, Farah's house. Managed to squeeze a few hours of school even then. It was fun meeting my juniors again especially with two of them home from overseas and seeing how much their families have grown and are growing.

We also managed to move on to the second great lesson, The Coming of Life, with the first lesson on the black line. In the picture you can see Ihsan rolling back the yarn at the end of the lesson.

We had some curious looks from people walking by the pathway but most just went by while some smiled after looking for a while and went on their different ways.

For the lesson, I had 30 metres of yarn and 1 cm of red ribbon with the red ribbon at the inner end of the spool.

As I told the story of how life came to be, based loosely on the story found in 'Children of the Universe' with some adjustments here and there, the children look out for the red strip which signify the coming of Man. They then see, how much later Man came and how long and how much it took before our history began. Montessori first came up with the lesson to teach some children humility during her sojourn in India where most of the elementary lessons started to develop.

As follow up, I did a timeline of the different life forms that I mentioned in my story. Ihsan was very interested and kept to the work. I plan to follow up with the Clock of Eras and journal work with inspiration from Miss Barbara's website.

I thought I'd do a timeline of a day in a child's life for Umayr but the timeline ended up as a crown.


Oh well, at least the prince co-operated and agreed to do his written work despite his royal status for the day.Oh yes, we do written work.
This has been our schedule since we got back
our homeschool day all to ourselves:

6.30: Solat/Shower/Breakfast/Play

8.00: Circle and outdoors

9.00: Independent work and presentations

11.00: Written Work as lunch is cooked

12.00: Lunch/play

1.00: Solat/ Quran/ Islam

2.00: End of school day


One of the new things that we have tried is copywriting. My kids hate writing, except Umayr who loves writing his Arabic letters.So when I came by copywriting lessons in my Waldorf lesson plans from waldorfenrichment.com, I thought I'd try them. Then I thought, why not copywrite the sayings of the Prophet (pbuh)?

So, the aim is in creating a beautiful piece of artwork in the form of letters. There are no lines and the children are free to write in any forms they like.

Last week, I incorporated botany, art and copywriting, akhlaq and quran into one lesson. I only do the lessons with Ihsan, Umayr just likes hanging around. Unfortunately that is my work, Ihsan was hiding from the camera.

What we did was, we studied the parts of the leaf from those that we picked up during outdoor lessons. I told them the story of the happy leaf as it danced in the sunlight while we did leaf stamping as a border in Ihsan's case, his younger siblings were just printing everywhere. I then wrote the hadith in the middle of the paper.

I am planning to use the Hadiths from the Ad-Duha manuals that goes along with the lessons that Ihsan is doing at the moment. So for this lesson we use the Hadith on how Allah will weigh even your smallest deeds as Ihsan is currently learning surah Al-Zalzalah.

My husband was super trying to please me this weekend, we went out most of the time. Luckily, we had the energy for school today; mostly tying up things we missed out on last week. InsyaAllah, this will be a fruitful week too. Here are the kids having a lego session at the hardcourt near the playground.