My daughter Samira has recently been reviewing nouns, adjectives and verbs, so I put together this table poster to help her remember how to distinguish between the three.
I printed off a set of word cards, in this case, all relating to weather and she used sticky tack on the back of cards to put them into their correct groups on the poster.
I had the idea to design this wall chart while my daughter, Samira was learning about Animal Classification. She made her Animal Classification Lapbook a couple of months ago and I thought this wall chart would be useful for all the kids to refer to anytime we need to look into Animal Classification.
The chart can be used to look up various animals from the different groups. And we can also practise identifying animals and putting them into their correct groups.
Under each sub group are a set of cards that can be removed and re-attached using sticky tack (although felt and velcro would work better, something I may re-do at a later date insha’Allah).
The Animal Kingdom is divided into two Phylum, the vertebrates and the invertebrates and the Phylum are then sub-divided into classes. There are 5 main classes of vertebrates and 4 classes of invertebrates.
I made a heading for each class. You can see in this picture below. Each heading includes details of the identifying features that are present in that class, i.e. Mammals are warm-blooded, give birth to live young, have hair or fur, etc.
The individual animal cards are then attached under the correct class heading on the wall chart. You can see that humans are classified as mammals but we have placed the picture of the human above the animals because of the unique position that Allah gave us when He favoured Mankind above all Creation.
Similarly, you can see under the Phylum invertebrates that there are various classes. Invertebrates are the most numerous of all the creation in the Animal Kingdom and some classes are sub-divided again into smaller groups. Such as the Arthropods who are sub-divided into crustaceans, insects and arachnids, each group having its own identify features that sets it apart from other arthropods.
Again, the cards are placed under the group headings. The group headings list the identify features so that the children can easily identify to which group the various animals belong.
If you would like to make your own wall chart you can find the printable files to download free from my File Share Widget which you will find as you scroll down the right of the screen.
My daughter Samira put this 2D Shapes Poster together as part of her review on shapes and also to help the younger ones recognise the shapes themselves and become familiar with their names.
I printed the shapes for Samira to colour, cut out and stick down, then she matched up the name labels to the shapes and pasted those down too. The numbers in brackets represent the number of sides the shapes have.
If you’d like to make a similar poster I have made the shapes and labels available to print out from my file share widget.
Last Spring I got onto the subject of metamorphosis with my eldest two and after giving them some examples of the creatures that undergo this process I let them choose which animal they would each like to focus on. Yusef decided he would like to learn about the frog (which was rather fortunate, because at the time grandad had just discovered spawn in his pond. So we were able to take some and watch the process right before our eyes, masha’Allah!)
Samira chose the butterfly and after watching some videos on the internet about the Life Cycle of the Butterfly, she made this colourful poster. This Spring we are hoping to watch the process up close. Every Spring we get lots of caterpillars in our garden, so we will try collecting some, feeding them in a tank and hopefully watch them develop into butterflies (or moths, depending on the caterpillar species).
Samira is also going to make a lapbook all about butterflies, and we may even do the life cycle of the frog again so that the younger ones can join in - so lots planned for this coming Spring insha’Allah.
I put together this story poster with my 6 year old daughter, Samira. It’s based on the story of Prophet Nuh (alayhi salam). We used the Learning Roots book on Prophet Nuh to add the captions. I very highly recommend all of the Learning Roots products. You can buy the books from their website here.
I googled ‘Noah’s Ark Colouring Pages’ and found a number of suitable colouring pages. I edited a couple of the images using MS Paint to remove the facial features, then I printed them for my daughter to colour.
While she was colouring I typed up and printed out the captions and then we cut out the images and glued everything down in order.
The poster now hangs on the bedroom wall and is perfect for a quick bedtime story. The rhyming narration is quickly memorised and the pictures explain the story to all ages, masha’Allah.
If you would like to make a similar poster I have made the colouring files available in my File Share Widget which you can find in the menu bar on the right of the screen.
This poster was also part of our Focus on Hajj theme with our local home-school group. It is designed to tell the story of the Miracle of the Well of Zam-Zam. The story is split into four parts with an image for each part to help tell the story.
The first part of the story shows a camel and footprints in the desert sand. The footprints represent the journey of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham), peace be upon him, when he journeyed into the desert with his wife Hajar and son Isma’il, peace be upon them. It was Allah’s command that he leave them in the desert valley of Makkah.
The camel is made to look 3D. We did this by placing a tab of stiff card behind it and attaching it to the poster. The sun is made with different coloured layers of tissue paper.
Under each of the parts of the story are narrations written by the older children to explain the story.
The second part of the poster depicts a hot dry desert. We made the sun larger to signify the intense heat and thirst that Hajar and Isma’il would have experienced. We also made a 3D cactus plant in the same way that we attached the camel.
This image depicts the running of Hajar back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwa in her desperate search for water. The children were then able to link this story to the ritual of Sa’y performed today during the Hajj Pilgrimage.
The final image represents the springing forth of the Well of Zam-Zam from beneath the feet of the baby Isma’il by the grace of Allah. We then went onto discuss the Well of Zam-Zam as it stands today and about the benefits of drinking it’s blessed water. We also talked a little about the history of Makkah and how the city came to be thanks to the plentiful water supplied from the miraculous Well of Zam-Zam.
This was one of the largest and most detailed projects I have ever worked on with my kids and I also learned so much along the way, masha’Allah. The Honey Bee is the most fascinating creature and is truly a blessed creation. I can’t take full credit for this project because it was actually emailed to me in a Lapbook format from an absolutely wonderful list I’m on dedicated to Lapbooking. Anyone interested in Lapbook or wanting to know more would benefit from signing up here insha’Allah. This list is set up to coincide with the Islamic Lapbooking Blog which is an absolute must-see for anyone addicted to Lapbooking.
The above photo doesn’t do true justice to the scale of this piece of work. It is two A1 sheets taped together. It was so large and so heavy that even a combination of blu-tac and drawing pins couldn’t keep this on the wall for more than 24 hours at a time! Eventually it came down from the wall and is being kept in safe storage until we can take it apart carefully and put it together into a lapbook form.
All the mini-books and templates for this project are available to download for free in my BOX.net file share widget which you will find as you scroll down the menu on the right of the screen.
With a whole chapter of the Qur’an (Surah An-Nahl) named after this amazing creature, it was the focal point of the project to look at the ayat (verses) which mention the honey bee. We read the verses and then discussed the meaning of it and I asked the kids what they thought the verses meant in their own words, and by the end of this project they were amazed that these two short verses were so precise and detailed enough to show that Allah is the Creator of amazing things, subhan’Allah!!
We put together a set of about 10 vocabulary cards. I googled for some images to add to the vocabulary cards to help the kids understand a little better what we were talking about, and as I said before, I learned quite a bit too from the very beginning! There was a nice template of a pocket to fit our vocab cards into. Alot of the stuff I printed onto various shades of yellow card for obvious reasons ;D
We made some hexagonal cells from cardboard and then filled them with scrunched up golden tissue paper to make them look like honey-filled cells.
I’m sure many of you will have seen something like this before. This shows the four stages of the life of the honey bee. From the egg through to the adult stage. Turn the wheel to see the different stages.We also watched a great time lapse video on the development and growth of the honey bee here.
Then we learned a bit more about the Queen Bee herself and put together this simple question and answer flap book. The questions were pasted onto the front of the flaps and the answers were researched and then written inside. We found a lot of information on the Queen Bee here.
Another little flap book with a few more details on the Queen Bee.
A diagram on the Honey Bee anatomy coloured and labeled by my son. I got him to do a bit of research himself in a book called ’Ants, Bees and Wasps’ and he was able to use the info from there to complete the diagram labels.
Next we did a bit of research into Drones. These are the male honey bees who fertilise the Queen bees eggs. There are only about 10-15 drones in one hive and their sole job is mate with the Queen. We made a little hexagonal-shaped flap with some info on Drones.
The flap template was actually quite small considering all the information we wanted to include, so I decided it would be a good opportunity to let my son brush up on his IT skills. So he sat and typed up the information into hexagonal boxes which we then printed, cut out and pasted onto the flaps. We found lots of information about Drones here and we found this video very useful too, masha’Allah (although I would advice caution if visiting the website of Harun Yahya, Allahu alem)
The Waddle Dance (sometimes known as the Waggle Dance) is a very interesting phenomenon of the Honey Bee, masha’Allah. I knew next to nothing about this until we watched this informative video. We watched the video a few times and then I got the kids to tell me in their own words what they understood about it. Then my son wrote inside the little book to explain what he understood about the Waddle Dance, what it is and why the bees do it.
The term “busy bee” is no joke! The Worker honey bee has an almost never-ending list of jobs to do as you can see from the photos above. All the worker bees are non-reproducing females and they work almost non-stop until they die. On average, the worker bees live for about 6 weeks in the Summer and 4 months in the winter. The reason they live longer in the winter is because they are not collecting nectar or pollen during this time.
We really enjoyed doing the research to make this little T-book on what bees do for us and what they give us. Again, the template was very small so after talking about this subject I typed up these little flaps, printed them and folded them.
Next we made a list of all the Honey bee’s predators. We found a long list of Honey Bee Predators here but alot of them were animals that even I didn’t recognise, so I decided it would be a good idea to print pictures of the predators too, just to make it a bit easier for the kids to understand. We also watched a couple of really interesting videos on how bees deal with predators using a defence tactic called “balling”. For some reason, these videos were my son’s favourite part of the project (why is it always boys who like the gory stuff LOL!)
We printed and pasted a larger photo of the Golden Rod Spider attacking a honey bee.
I searched for hours one night looking for a labelled diagram detailing the process step-by-step on how bees make honey but I couldn’t find anything suitable anywhere. So in the end I resolved to make a diagram myself. If you would like to use it, you can download it from the link here by scrolling down to the item titled: “How Bees make Honey”.
After looking at how bees make honey we made a brainstorm chart showing the health benefits of honey.
Then we made a note book with photos and information on different kinds of bees.
We found out a lot of information about different kinds of bees here and we extended our research using Wikipedia.
Finally we finished up with a colouring page and a honeycomb-shaped worksheet to list facts about bees. All in all, it was a very thorough and enjoyable project.
With my husband being Algerian, I thought it would be nice for the kids to learn a bit about their roots. And it just so happened that at the time Algeria had just qualified for the African Cup of Nations and the FIFA World Cup 2010 so we all of a sudden became very patriotic in our house LOOOL! With all the focus on Algeria I thought it would be perfect timing for a geography project, and our first port of call became ALGERIA.
The two older kids worked together on this poster.
My son worked on the flag while my daughter wrote up the history of the flag and what the colours represent.
We talked about the famous foods that are produced and exported from Algeria.
We looked at the geography and topography of Algeria, learning where the Sahara desert begins and learning where the famous mountain ranges are.
We learned the Arabic name for Algeria: Djazair, and we also learned a few facts about the country in comparison to the rest of the world. Then my son completed a quiz on Algeria and its border countries which involved some map reading.
We learned all the names of the countries that border Algeria and coloured-coded them on the map of Africa.
We talked about the Deglet Nour dates which is the most famous food export of Algeria and later on we did a seperate project all about dates.
Finally we made a small time-line along the bottom of the poster to give a brief understanding of the history of Algeria. The kids grandfather took part in the revolution against France, so they got to learn about the stories of the Mujahideen too, masha’Allah.
Last year I covered the Solar System with my eldest son and daughter. At the time we were really into making posters for everything because they would hang them on the walls in their bedroom and it would be amazing to see how much info they retained just by seeing them day after day. My daughter, who was 5 years old at the time wasn’t massively interested in space and the planets … it tends to be a ‘boy thing’ which, at the age of 6 was most definately the case with my son.
I decided that the best way to learn the names of the planets was to have them put together a poster which would be a visual aid. My son knew most if not all of the planet names already but he didn’t know the correct order and within 2 days of this hanging on the bedroom wall he had memorised it, masha’Allah. My daughter is still not a strong reader and struggled with the names but she recognised the planets because we talked alot about them as we painted them, and she remembers the ones that she painted LOL! and with big brother helping her, she has also learned to memorise them.
I followed up this poster with a more in depth project with my son, details of which will be posted later on insha’Allah.
We used an A1 size piece of black card (which was only just big enough) and painted the edge with an orange arc to represent the sun. Then using a brush we dabbed the card with spots of PVA glue and sprinkled with silver glitter to create the effect of stars in deep space. Then my son pasted out the title with PVA glue and my daughter added on the silver glitter to spell out “The Solar System”.
Using a text book for guidance, I showed my son how to use a pair of compasses to draw perfect circles, and he drew the planets on white card according to their relative sizes. Then we had lots of fun mixing up paint colours that would be just right for each planet. The kids painted on the base colours and we left them to dry for a couple of hours before adding on finer details to make the planets look realistic (yes, I did help with that part).
When everything was dry, we glued down the planets and painted on the rings around Saturn (which I later regreted not actually drawing them and cutting them out on card first because the after effects of the painting and the shortage of space on the card meant the rings looked a bit wonky and squashed LOL!) Finally we cut out and pasted on the planet name labels.
Last year just before Ramadhan we had lovely weather, masha’Allah, so we were able to do alot of our lessons and arts and crafts in the garden … so much less hassle than trying to get paint off the carpet or the dining table!! I thought it would be nice to make a large poster showing the moon phase cycle and it has helped my son to memorise the 8 major phases and their names. Our poster is based on the cycle as seen in the Northern Hemisphere.
First of all I printed off some moon phase templates onto thin card which I then cut out ready for my son to paint them a pale grey colour. You can find the templates here. Being outside in the warm air they dried much faster too.
While waiting for the templates to dry, he got to work on colouring in the labels for each of the phases. I just used MS Word Art to create the 8 labels:
NEW MOON (not visible), WAXING CRESCENT, HALF MOON, WAXING GIBBOUS, FULL MOON, WANING GIBBOUS, HALF MOON, WANING CRESCENT.
We didn’t make a template that represents the New Moon because the poster was made using black card, and obviously, seeing as the New Moon is not visible to the naked eye it wasn’t necessary to add a template to the poster.
We used orange paint on the edge of the black sheet of card to represent the angle of the sun and then the templates were glued into their relevant positions with a title label in the middle of the diagram.
Finally the labels were added and the poster is complete … a useful diagram that serves as a refresher as Ramadhan approaches.
