Feb 3-6 Monte Class Week 1

For our co-op next week, we will be learning Seerah of the Prophet. To warm up, all but one of the girls from the co-op are in my monte class, I did the Story of the Elephants from a time perspective:

What day is it today? Do you know what day it is tomorrow? Who knows what month we are in? How about the year we are in now? In what year were you born? Now we have names for our days, months and years.

A long time ago, long before you were born, long before your parents or grandparents were born, people talk about time by recalling what interesting things happened. 

It was so the year our Prophet (pbuh) was born. That year was called the year of the Elephant...

At this point a few students started calling out that they know the story from Surah Al Fil. I invited one of them to recite to me from memory. After that I gave a transliteration of the Surah. If your students are not able to recite, you may do the recitation yourself. 

There are 3 very important places to all Muslims. Can you name them? (Masjidil Haram in Mecca, Masjid Nabawi in Madinah & Masjid Al-Aqsa in Palestine). 

At the time before the Prophet's birth, a ruler in Yemen built a church and wanted everyone to come to it instead of to Kaabah. However, he was not able to attract the crowds that went to Mecca and so he decided to attack Kaabah.

Some said there was only one, others said many elephants were part of the troop, but elephants were certainly not common in the Arabian peninsula such that the year the planned attack happened was called The Year of the Elephant. 

However, Abrahah's army did not even get near Kaabah for the elephants refused to enter its borders and Allah sent birds that carried hot stones that killed them. 

Allah has protected Kaabah then and He continues to protect it to this day.

I then drew an elephant from the letter 'fa', 'ya' and 'lam'. I had to write the arabic word for elephant for all of them but two were able to draw most of the elephant on their own. 

The girls then continued their puppy play from yesterday. Two of them would pretend to be puppies and the others their owners who would feed and play with them. I wonder where this interest in puppies is coming from? Is it because we can't have dogs in the home as pets? Or do they just find them cute?

I must note this for my biology lessons. It would be a good hook.

The freedom to pretend play for about 15 min, eased them into my 'academic' lesson. I had my box of geometric solids before me and I asked them to guess what was inside. Answers ranged from a bird to food.

I presented the cube, square-based pyramid and triangle-based pyramid. The cube I related to the Kaabah and the pyramids, what else, to the pyramids in Egypt. 

After the children have passed the shapes around and did the 3-part lesson. We did a version of Nenek Si Bongkok Tiga with the solids. 

A child would choose one of the three shapes while the other children closed their eyes. At the end of the song, the Nenek would stop and pass the solid to the student who has to guess the solid. If correct, he escapes being Nenek and the current one has to continue. If wrong, he becomes the next Nenek. 

So I basically went from combining geometry with structures to playing a traditional Malay game. Alhamdulillah, it was one of this inspired teaching days.