Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Safari park!

Making use of the beautiful spring-time weather, bookworms decided to have some fun in Safari park. The weather was beautiful - in fact, just perfect for a park outing. Children enjoyed playground, while mothers were discussing some organizational matters related to the book club. We did have a couple new homeschooling families join us - Alhamdulillah, the community is growing!

After common snack time, some families left for home, while others continued to enjoy the attractions of Safari park.


 
 

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

The manners of dinosaurs and paper weaving

As usual, bookworms were happy to come together for another book club. This week, the smaller bookworms enjoyed two books about dinosaurs. Well, not really about dinosaurs themselves but about dinosaurs who were behaving like small children. :)

We read "How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?" and "How Do Dinosaurs Eat their Food?" by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague.

Starting out with the food habits of dinosaurs, children smiled through the numerous bad habits the dinosaurs in the book had - they burped, they threw cereal from the table, they put beans up their noses, spit out their broccoli half-chewed and blew bubbles in their milk. But it turned out that all the bad habits were just jokes - the real dinosaurs sat neatly at the table, said "please" and "thank you", finished food on their plates and asked for more, if they were still hungry. Bookworms did discuss also that food is a blessing that Allah gives us, therefore, we should always have good manners of eating, say our Duas before and after the meal and thank Allah for the food He gives us.


In the second book, the dinosaurs were sick with flu. And once again the first part of the book was full of funny bad habits dinosaurs had - throwing dirty tissues all over the floor, spitting out their medicines, running away and hiding when in doctor's office and not keeping their blankets on, when in bed. In the second part of the book, we learned that actually the dinosaurs were very patient when they were sick - they listened to the advice of doctors (because doctors know best), took their medicines nicely, stayed in bed and drank lots of juice.

After reading, small bookworms had activity - making a small weaved carpet of colourful strips of paper. Umm Uzair guided them through step by step, until everybody had a nice colourful carpet to take home.




Big girls had a bit more challenging paper weaving activity - they were making small woven pouches that were opening up.