Together We Read: June Book & Activities

Assalamu alaikum,

The book we read in June for Together We Read was, Only You, by Robin Cruise.

And then...

The first line of the story gave me an idea. The first line reads:

When sunrise glows peachy rose at dawn,

I love the way you stretch and yawn.

Well, I had to change the part about yawning when I read it aloud because yawning is from the shaytaan (I didn't even notice that when I chose the book subhana'Allah- someone pointed that out to me later) but the part about dawn gave me this idea: to learn some of the dua that we say in the morning after the fajr.

So I painted (well tried to paint...lol) the first scene from the story:

This is hanging on the wall at toddler level. In the morning, the windows in the larger house open to reveal:

Two of the adiya'a that we say in the morning.

The small house on the left side of the picture says, "Adhkar As-Sabah" (Morning Supplications).

So now each morning, we can open the windows of the house and say the adthar as a way to learn them insha'Allah. The dua cards can be changed so when we have learned these insha'Allah, I'll put a new dua in each window insha'Allah.

To go along with the poster, we made a little book of dua:

These last two pictures show how small the book is compared with a sheet of A4 paper and then the back cover of the book. There are 19 pages with dua on them (I think one repeats).

After this we did games about the parts of the body because throughout the story different parts of the body are mentioned and the person reading aloud will read that he/she loves the child's hand in theirs, their hair, etc.

The first game

The second game

There is also a wheel that has only four body parts (for beginners)

We took turns spinning and whatever body part we landed on we said the name of the body part and looked for the matching card. If we got it correct we keep the card, if not we put it back. The cards can also be used without the spinner for other games too insha'Allah. We put the cards from both games into one deck and placed them face down. We took turns picking a card, naming the body part and then indentifying it on our own bodies. We then put the cards back into the stack/deck. We also talked about how each of our body parts is a gift from Allah and we talked about what we use each body part for (i.e. the ear is used to listen to Quran, ahadith, the speech of other humans and the sounds that animals make, etc.). I also wanted to order this Body Parts Felt set but it seems if you live outside of the United States then the shipping is prohibitively expensive so we left it.

I did not have the chance to put the body parts cards in Arabic with the transliteration but I made a pronunciation chart. If you'd like to use the little book of dua you can download it here (Arabic/English) and the Dua Book with Arabic Transliteration here and if you'd like to use the body parts games you can download them here insha'Allah.

So, what did you read? Link up and share insha'Allah!