27th meeting

Our Today's Story: "How Many Jawbreakers?" from "Kids-Life Devotions"

After a week off due to the spell of sickness that Umm Uzair's family went through, we were happy to come together for another book club meeting.

As we were waiting for all the kids to arrive, Umm Uzair decided to switch around the usual order of our book club. This time, we started with the crafts activity. As Umm Uzair handed out to each of us a square piece of paper, she told us about the ancient Chinese art of origami - folding of paper into different shapes. She told us that already in one of the earlier book club meetings, kids had dome some origami. This time, she had in mind for us a project of origami steamer-ship. Folding was simple but not easy, as we always had to match the corners and edges of paper folds most carefully and make sure that all the folding lines were tightly pressed. Here below you can see the pictures of the ships we made.

After we finished the ships, Umm Uzair handed to us a long piece of paper, which was left over from the A4 size pages after cutting out squares. In order not to waste the paper, we cut out from these edges lovely strings of little men and women, who could sail our ships!

Then we sat down for the story. Umm Uzair asked us, if we liked to win in competitions and how we felt, when we were the winners. All of us agreed that it felt very good to win and to receive certificates or gifts for our achievements. The story that we read this time was about a boy, who also really liked winning and wanted to win in a competition arrange by his class teacher. It was called "How Many Jawbrakers?" and the main character of the story was Andy Jackson.

One day, Andy's class teacher had on her table a big jar full of jawbreakers. (Umm Uzair explained to us that jawbrakers were very large balls of chewing-gum, which, when eaten, filled the entire mouth and thus were difficult to chew. Since chewing them took a lot of effort, they were called 'the jawbrakers'.) The teacher announced a competition - she asked children to guess, just how many jawbrakers were in the jar. The one with the closest estimate (that's a fancy word for 'guess' that we learned) would get the whole jar. Andy really wanted the jar.

When the break came, all the kids run outside. Teacher sent Andy back to class to bring a whistle she had forgotten on her table. As Andy was taking the whistle, he noticed a note on the table saying "732 jawbreakers". He couldn't believe his luck - he saw the answer!

Later, when teacher asked the kids to write down their guesses, Andy was puzzled what to do. He prayed to Allah to help him to make the right choice. Finally, he decided not to cheat and instead of 732, he wrote down as his guess 237 - just the opposite number of what he had seen. He was said he wouldn't win, but he felt good because he had done the right thing.

When the teacher announced the results, it turned out that Andy had the closest guess and won the whole jar of jawbreakers!!! How so? The note he had seen on the teachers table was not the answer - it was a guess made by a girl, who had to leave early! Thus, by being honest and doing the right thing, Andy won.

Umm Uzair encouraged also us to pray to Allah, whenever we faced any difficult situation and didn't know what to do. Allah can always help us to make the right choice!