What A Busy Week

We've been working hard this week and accomplished most of what I planned.

I've really been using Starfall a lot this week, as well as Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is really helping, MashaALLAH, we're using more Arabic all the time and my daughter has naturally picked up sentence structure and verb conjugation through the program, AlhamduLILLAH.



It seems to be easier to rotate the older two to the computer for language lessons so that I can give them individual attention without interruption.

I might set up other stations as well if I can stop procrastinating, InshaALLAH. An Arabic station would be nice. I keep coming across such helpful things like this Arabic letter position flip book at Talibiddeen Jr.





I printed it on green cardstock and then laminated it and punched two holes in the top (ouch, my hand - the three hole punch wouldn't line up correctly, so I used the hand-held one). I used 1"loose leaf rings (100 for $7.99 on EBay) and I didn't cut between the individual letters (to keep it simple).

I also printed out the Arabic Numbers Practice Book from YemenLinks.


This page is from Talibiddeen Jr.





Instead of letting my daughter color the pages and forget all about them, I borrowed the idea from Chasing Cheerios to print the pages and put them in protective sheets. We added them to her binder and now she can write on them with the dry erase markers.

Reusable workbooks, MashaALLAH. It saves paper, she can do them again as needed, and when she's done, her brother can use them, InshaALLAH.

We've been going strong in our Islamic Studies, starting with the family tree of the Prophet Muhammad salallahu,alayhi wa salaam.I read a bit from our new books and added some of the more vibrant details from the Sealed Nectar as well as Stories of the World by Safia Iqbal.

We finally put a few names on the tree and in our notebooks.




Instead of doing traditional coloring pages, we colored the most vital elements and added them to our notebooks.





My daughter is doing well with her vocabulary and spelling, but we really need to work on spacing! The words run together quite a bit but I think daily copywork will fix this problem, InshaALLAH.

I find notebooking fun and less stressful than lapbooking. MashaALLAH, there are some beautiful lapbooks out there but I think I need a tutorial, lol. Not about how a lapbook is put together, I know how they look, but who does most of the work and how many days does it take?

Here is are some pages from our notebook. We were learning about the dangers of idol worship and also about the Prophet Adam (AS), Habeel and Qabeel, and how the community grew.








The opportunities to study geography are abundant, so we started with Makkah and Medina and Jeddah.



I've been wanting to do this for a while and I would like to continue with some key elements of geography (continents, bodies of water and land forms, ie peninsula, island, etc) as well. I have all the necessary items for this but I would love to get a large world map, InshaALLAH. Read More...

Where Are You From?

I remember when I read Roots by Alex Haley. I have to say that I found it to be thought-provoking and inspiring. It's worth a read and if I weren't so stubborn about re-reading, I would read it again. Instead, I'm reading The Book of Negroes and so far it is a heart-wrenching page-turner.

I joined ancestry.com recently and I was so excited and intrigued when I got started and stayed awake late into the night researching old census records. I've been burning myself out while trying to expand my family tree and it has been so hard to wake up at a decent hour lately. It is important to me to know from where I came and who my people were, so it is an endeavor for which I am willing to suffer (within reason, of course). After a few days of this, I took a break and just started looking again yesterday.

I called my second cousin yesterday and she told me a little about my great great grandfather on my mother's side of the family. Apparently, he was born a slave in 1847 in Mississippi. He and his four brothers escaped via the Mississippi River (swimming along it, SubhanALLAH) and made their way to Louisiana and then to Texas.

He later married my great great grandmother Anna who was born about 1868 in Texas. She was of Native American heritage - most likely Cherokee but we're not 100% yet.

My cousin was also wanting to get in touch with my great Aunt Ruthie Lee but SubhanALLAH - she passed away a couple of hours after we talked on the phone.

I am thinking about having my heritage traced via DNA testing at African Ancestry but I need to save up since it's so pricey. Read More...