Islamic studies at home
Complete terms of Islamic studies for families teaching at home.
Twenty minutes a day. We have already decided what comes first, and written down exactly what to say.
Standing. A first term on the prayer. Twelve weeks, ages seven to nine. Reviewed before it is printed.
You are not behind.
Almost every parent who finds us arrives feeling late. She has a folder of downloaded worksheets she never used, and a quiet worry that the Islamic side of her children’s education has been left to a weekend class and to chance. That is a very ordinary place to be standing. Begin where you are.
What you are actually buying
Sequence, and the words to say
Information is free and you know it. There is more material about the prayer available to you in ten seconds than you could read in a year, and none of it has told you what to teach on Monday.
What is missing is the order. Somebody has to decide what comes first, what comes second, and what a nervous parent should say out loud at each point. We have decided it, written it down word for word, and had it checked before it went to print. That is the whole product.
It is why we do not open Term One with wudu. We open with the night, because a child who has been given a reason to care about the prayer will learn the washing in a fortnight, and a child who has not will perform it perfectly by nine and never know what it is for.
The shape of a lesson
The twenty minutes you actually need
Every lesson in every term runs on the same five steps, so a parent who has read week one never has to learn the shape again. Twenty minutes, four days a week, and one longer family session on a Friday.
Prepare
One item, put out before you begin. Never more than one, because a lesson that needs a shopping list is a lesson that does not happen.
2 minutes
The lesson, word for word
The script, read aloud as it is written or said in your own way. Every pause is marked.
4 minutes
Read this once
One passage from the child's book, read once, and said beforehand that it is only once.
4 minutes
Tell it back to me
Four words, and then silence. The pause is where the work is happening.
5 minutes
The Anchor
One action, tied to something that already happens every day. Never a craft and never a worksheet.
5 minutes
Before it is printed
We checked
Everything taught is restricted to what the four Sunni schools hold in common. Where the schools differ, we say so plainly and your family follows its own practice.
Every verse is referenced by chapter and verse. Every narration is referenced by collection and grading. Weak narrations are not used, however lovely they are and however often they appear on posters, and where we have deliberately left a well known one out, the guide names it and explains why.
On the illustrations
No face is drawn on any human or animal, and no prophet is depicted in any form. What is drawn instead is architecture, sky, water, light, doorways, textiles and geometry, seen from the child’s own eye height. We draw the place a thing happened, not the person it happened to.
The five positions we have signed our name to are set out in full, in the same words that appear in the front of every book.
The first week, free
Not a sampler. The actual first week of Term One.
Both halves, exactly as they are printed. The child’s illustrated pages, and the full parent guide chapter with the lesson word for word, the anchor, the questions to ask at the table and the sources at the back.
Use it tonight. If it does not suit your family, you have lost twenty minutes and gained a lesson your child will remember.