A few posts back, I mentioned that we were working on a Spring lapbook. We did start it but R didn’t seem as interested. So, I put it aside til another time.
R is really enjoying the warm weather masha’Allah and loves the fact that she doesn’t have to wear her coat. And so, she is forever asking me whether she can wear her ‘jacket’ today because it is Spring. Well, the weather hasn’t been very ‘Springish’ these last few days and one of them she had to wear her coat.
Furious that the weather had changed so drastically, she asked me, “Ummi, why is it sunny one day? And raining and windy another day?” So, I grabbed the opportunity headed down to our local library and took this out:
I then headed over to one of my favourite places on the net! And downloaded everything for a weather lapbook. Basically, I see what mini book she will be working on in her lapbook, read about it from the library book and then complete the mini book for her lapbook.
Today, we learnt about how snow forms and she drew 3 pictures to show how it forms (and I filled in the written description):
I don’t know if you can see it, but basically ice crystals form in the highest part of clouds. They then gather together and form snowflakes which then falls to the ground. She really grasped the idea masha’Allah.
We also learnt about hail, fog and dew. We read about it and completed the mini books. R couldn’t understand how fog is basically clouds that are near the ground. So, we headed off to youtube.com and I searched for fog and we watched a video of some people walking through a cloud! She couldn’t believe it and her face lit up like she understood! 
So, after that we had to search for dew and hail as well. Seeing it made so much sense to her.
The traffic lights, see my old post was a huge success and so we made this to teach the different sounds of ‘th’. I present Thameena and Thawri:
I took a piece of card, jazzed up the sides a little bit (if you can call it that. Drew a girl in hijab and a boy in a kufi. Wrote ‘th’ on the hijab and kufi and then asked R to copy words for one type of ‘th’ on Thameena’s hijab, and the other type of ‘th’ words on Thawri’s thobe. I cannot tell you how much she loved this. She then coloured it as they were just ‘too plain’.
She not only read all the words but played with it all day! When it was put down, she pretended to be thawri (with sword in hand) defending Thameena from those that won’t allow her to wear hijab. It was hilarious. But hey, if she’s happy, I’m happy!
Finally, I have been spending way too much time on the www.learninga-z.com site. They are allowing free downloads for one day only for the week. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to the sister who told me about this. I spent more than 2 hours downloading non-fiction levelled readers for R and other reading resources and an entire one-year science program based around literacy. Today is the last day for the sciene, but try and catch the writing freebie day tomorrow.
And I would be rude if I didn’t introduce the latest member of our family (well, she’s a member for 2 weeks) – Mineko, the terrapin. Her family have travelled to Algeria for 2 weeks, so we are babysitting. I haven’t formally introduced her to Sulhafat (our tortoise) as Mineko is a meat-eating terrapin, and I’m scared my beloved very slow tortoise will be bitten and eaten up! Anyway, here she is:
Posted by ummraiyaan 