The Balloons Day

This week, Zainab and her mother had invited us to have the bookclub meeting in their home. We read a story about Percy, the park keeper, and his animal friends - "The Hedgehogs' Balloon" (by Nick Butterworth). In the story, Percy saw some balloons floating by. As he picked them, he heard some crying, which turned out to be a hedgehog sitting and crying. The hedgehog said that he also loved balloons but never got the chance to have one, because it would burst on his spines. Percy had an idea how to help the hedgehog. To see what the idea was and whether it was helpful for the hedgehog, find your copy of the book and read it! :)

After reading, we took out our balloons we had brought along, blew up one and decorated them. Then, aunty Laila showed us a small experiment with the balloons: we blew up another one and held it in our fingers at the opening, without tying it. Aunty Laila directed us to pull our hands apart and let some air out of the balloons - this made all kinds of funny noises! The more we pulled the openings of balloons, the deeper the sound got. And if we pulled it open just a little - a very high pitch sound was coming. Auty Laila told us that this is exactly how our own voice works - the same thing is happening in our throats, when we make higher or lower pitch sounds.

There was more excitement to come - aunty Laila asked us to tie two blown up balloons to our ankles and come in the car porch of the house. She arranged us in a circle for a game. We had to burst the balloons of other kids by stepping on them, at the same time trying to save our own ones! That was a lot of noise and fun. And the winner of our game was Fatimah!

In today's show-and-tell, the Pirani family had brought along the clay tablets they had worked on as part of their history studies. They had studied the ancient forms of writing, one of which was writing on clay tablets - so they had tried it out and brought for all of us to see, masha'Allah!

Planet Earth

our paper birds

Our home the Earth is an awe-some place and in order to introduce a few of its wonders to the Book Worm Club members, we had a viewing of the first segment of BBC's Planet Earth series called From Pole To Pole.Alhumdulillah It was a beautiful overview of the various biomes around us and we home to continue viewing the rest of the program in the future months Insha'Allah. Laila Aunty organized a quick activity where the children cut out bird decoration out of paper. She found these hanging in a community center in Latvia, and asked them to teach her the design Masha'Allah.


Alhumdulillah we had four little presenters sharing their work for show and tell:

Hassan's flash cards
Haneen & Saffiyah's diorama of a zoo, MAsha'Allah, this fit in well with today's theme.

Haneen and Suffiyah put together a large diorama of a zoo, which we all agreed was much nicer that the one we visited; the animals were not behind bars and seemed a lot happier.

Fatima's poster

Fatima made a chart about different seasons, on the other side of the chart was an outline of a map of Pakistan which she left for the Book Club members to complete.

Even little Hassan brought some flashcards to share, made by his mother and mounted on popsicle sticks we enjoyed identifying the letters and pictures as he displayed them to us.