Taraweeh Prayer Rugs

 

I have been like a whirlwind in the kitchen today and I was struggling to find something to entertain the kids who always seem to get hyper as we draw closer to iftar time.

A quick search online at the wonderful Talibiddeen Jr.com resulted in an hour of peace, alhamdulillah!

I managed to disentangle the kids from Abi’s legs long enough to get them sitting down to  do this activity.

I printed out the prayer rug templates onto white card and left the rest to the kids. The older two helped out the younger two, masha’Allah. I gave them some wool and glue and they added tassles to the edges of the prayer mats. You can find the file for this activity here.

Very pretty, masha’Allah!

Papier Mache Kab’ah

This project started out as part of our ‘Focus on Hajj’ theme at our local Home-school group. For a few weeks I saved a number of cereal boxes and the day before we met for the group I taped the boxes together to form a large cuboid. I used 10 boxes altogether.

On the day I prepared some papier mache paste and cut some newspapers into strips ready for the kid to start the first stage of making a papier mache model of the Kab’ah.

The kids from the home-school group worked together to paste strips of newspaper all over the cardboard boxes, covering it with a few layers of paper. At the end of the day I took it home to let it dry until the next session. When I took it back next time it looked like this:

During the next session we let the kids loose with black poster paint, painting the model until it was black all over.

At the end of the session I took the model home to finish drying. Unfortunately it happened that the home-school group had to break up for the holidays, so I let my two older kids finish the model at home.

They decorated it using gold glitter while I printed out images of the Kab’ah door and the Hajr al Aswad (the Black Stone) for them to paste on.

Algeria Project: Canvas Work

This is the large canvas we worked on as a family, designed to represent our family roots (on my husband’s side).

We started off with a few layers of paint to colour the two sides of the flag, green and white. The white represents peace, and the green represents the beautiful and productive land. Once it was dry we painted on the red star and crescent moon which represents the religion of Islam which is considered to be the national religion. The colour red represents the blood of the Mujahideen who fought against France for the Independence of Algeria from 1954-1962.

Next I got the kids to dip their right hands in paint and print onto the four corners of the canvas. Then my husband painted their names in Arabic underneath. Finally when everything was dry, I went around the edge of the hand prints and the edges of the names with coloured glitter glue.

MASHA’ALLAH! TABARAK’ALLAH!

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.

Ramadhan Decorative Lanterns

Asalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu…

It has been quite some time since I last blogged. In fact the kids and I have been very busy with quite a few projects over the last couple of months so I shall begin sharing them now.

During Ramadhan I came up with the idea of making Ramadhan Lanterns with the kids. It was something I had made myself as a kid (although the focus wasn’t on Ramadhan then). I don’t really know where the idea of lanterns ties in with Ramadhan but I tied in the craft with a lesson on the Parable of the Lamp from Surat An-Noor [Qur'an 24:35]

 اللَّهُ نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ مَثَلُ نُورِهِ كَمِشْكَاةٍ فِيهَا مِصْبَاحٌ ۖ الْمِصْبَاحُ فِي زُجَاجَةٍ ۖ الزُّجَاجَةُ كَأَنَّهَا كَوْكَبٌ دُرِّيٌّ يُوقَدُ مِن شَجَرَةٍ مُّبَارَكَةٍ زَيْتُونَةٍ لَّا شَرْقِيَّةٍ وَلَا غَرْبِيَّةٍ يَكَادُ زَيْتُهَا يُضِيءُ وَلَوْ لَمْ تَمْسَسْهُ نَارٌ ۚ نُّورٌ عَلَىٰ نُورٍ ۗ يَهْدِي اللَّهُ لِنُورِهِ مَن يَشَاءُ ۚ وَيَضْرِبُ اللَّهُ الْأَمْثَالَ لِلنَّاسِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ

“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is as (if there were) a niche and within it a lamp: the lamp is in a glass, the glass as it were a brilliant star, lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east (i.e. neither it gets sun-rays only in the morning) nor of the west (i.e. nor it gets sun-rays only in the afternoon, but it is exposed to the sun all day long), whose oil would almost glow forth (of itself), though no fire touched it. Light upon Light! Allah guides to His Light whom He wills. And Allah sets forth parables for mankind, and Allah is All-Knower of everything.”  [Qur'an 24:35]

The first thing you need to do is to take a sheet of card, square in shape, fold it in half to make it rectangular and draw a horizontal line all the way across the length about 2cms down from the top edge. And then draw vertical lines drown from the horizontal line to the bottom edge in 2cm intervals.

 

Next cut along the vertical lines from the bottom edge all the way up to the horizontal line. Don’t cut any higher than the horizontal line otherwise it’ll fall apart.

And then when you unfold it out back to the original square shape it should look like this:

Then turn the sheet of card over and roll it into a cylinder until one edge meets the other and it should look like an old style lantern, like so:

If your lantern looks like this then it’s going well

Next get some PVA glue and some coloured sequins and begin decorating the strips of the lantern. IMPORTANT: Leave one edge strip untouched. This will be used later on when the lantern is glued into it’s final position.

When all the glueing and sticking is done it should look something like this:

I should mention at this point that I think it would look more effective on black  or even dark grey card, but as we only had white card at the time, that had to suffice.

Leave the decorated card to dry properly for about 30 minutes so the sequins don’t start dropping off and sliding as can happen when kids get a bit generous with the PVA glue!

When it’s dry, roll it back around into a cylinder and glue one edge strip on top of the other edge strip to ‘close’ the lantern.

And when it’s dry, add a card handle and it’s done!! MASHA’ALLAH!!

Papier Mache Masjid

The Papier Mache Masjid

[To view the full set of photos that accompany this project please click here ]

I had decided that this year was going to be a family-orientated Ramadhan… not that it hadn’t been before, but now that the kids are that bit older and they are more interested in learning I thought it would be a great opportunity to spend time focusing on Islamic Activities.

Someone suggested to me a great website that publishes Ramadhan activities every year and I thought that would be a great place to start.

One evening  just before Ramadhan arrived, I sat down and plucked out all the activities that suited my kids age range and level of understanding. I made a list and a time-table and then I explained it all to the kids. But this project wasn’t part of the list. The idea came to me one of those nights when my baby daughter was keeping me awake and my mind was on overdrive

I’ve never done anything this creative before so it was good fun for me too.

The first thing I had to do was look up a recipe for papier mache paste:

1. Put 5 cups of water into a pan to boil.
2. Put half a cup of flour and a cup of cold water into a bowl and mix until there are no lumps.
3. Pour the flour mixture into the boiled water.
4. Boil gently for two to three minutes, stirring until the paste becomes thick.
5. Leave for an hour to cool.

The paste turned out lump free and just as I remembered it back in my school days… so not bad for my first attempt. I cut up the newspaper into strips before hand to save some time. <Photo 1>

The next thing we had to do was to make the structure of the masjid. We sellotaped together empty cereal boxes and cake boxes. We used the plastic bowl as a mold for the masjid’s dome. The kids were quick to point out that this was a great way of recycling, masha’Allah. Once the boxes were firmly taped together we made a start on the papier mache covering the entire thing in strips of paste coated paper. <Photo 2> <Photo 3>

The trick to making the papier mache dome easy to remove from the mold when it’s dried is to first put on a layer of newspaper that has been moistened with water only. When we had covered the whole bowl with wet newspaper, then we began to add layers of newspaper and paste. We added several layers and then we had to leave it to dry overnight before adding further layers. We did this over a period of three days to make sure the dome was thick and strong when we finally removed it from the mold. <Photo 4>

We left the box structure to dry for a good 24 hours and we left the dome to dry for about 3 days to be sure that it wouldn’t tear when we removed it from the mold. <Photo 5> Next came the fun part – painting the structure. Before we started painting I suggested to the kids that they should think about their design and what colours they would like to use first. We also spent a few minutes ‘googling’ pictures of mosques just to get a few ideas. <Photo 6>

So the kids got busy painting the first coat of paint. They had decided they wanted to painting the whole thing in a sand brown colour first, and then when that had dried they wanted to do the top half in a dark red colour. <Photo 7> <Photo 8> <Photo 9>

We did one coat of sand brown in the morning and then the second coat in the afternoon and then left it overnight to dry and then we painted the top half in a dark red the next day which also needed two coats. I managed to salvage a cardboard tube from our recycling bin to use to make the minaret. <Photo 10>

We left the masjid model to dry and moved onto the delicate task of removing the papier mache dome from the plastic mold. Alhamdulillah, it came off in one piece and was ready for painting. <Photo 11>

I turned the frayed edges of the dome into the underside and then my son painted it with a golden coloured paint. It had several coats of paint to make sure the newspaper print didn’t show through. Then we started adding the finer details to the masjid including doors and windows. <Photo 12> <Photo 13> <Photo 14>

As the model started to take shape and become more recognisable as a masjid we talked as we worked about masjids in general, learning about the structure of the masjid, what happens in the masjid, why the masjid usually has two entrances, the purpose of the minaret, dua’s (supplications) for entering and leaving the masjid and the general Islamic etiquettes surrounding the Masjid. Finally we decided on a name for the masjid -The Masha’Allah Masjid. <Photo 15>

We made the minaret using a cardboard tube and some thin card to make the cone-shaped roof. <Photo 16> <Photo 17>

We used glitter glue and some card to put the finishing touches to the dome and more glitter glue to decorate the outline of the windows and doors. <Photo 18> <Photo 19>

Finally we used PVA glue and a few strips of sellotape to put the masjid together.

NOTE: For some reason WordPress is giving me a real hard time when I try to upload the photos for this project so please visit this link to view the photos related to this project: Papier Mache Photos (This link will open in a new window so you can view the photos alongside the blog insha’Allah)