Phases of the Moon Poster

Subhan’Allah, has it really been a whole year since I last blogged??

Well, alhamdulillah, we are a week away from Ramadhan insha’Allah, and my 7 year old son and I are making a start on our first ever Ramadhan lapbook with much inspiration from Umm Abdul Basir’s blog. Part of the lapbook will contain a section on phases of the moon and sighting the crescent moon which will signal the beginning of the month of Ramadhan. We are currently reviewing this subject from last year.

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.