Ramadan Calendar Tutorial

Here I will show you how I made a Ramadan calendar for my children. A Ramadan calendar works like an advent calendar but instead of counting down the days til Christmas, it counts down the days of Ramadan til Eid day.

During Ramadan Muslims must fast from dawn to dusk. This means that they must not eat or drink anything during daylight hours. The length of time of the fast varies each day as the days either lengthen or shorten throughout the month. At the end of the month, we celebrate Eid.

Indoor Fun Review

The second of the review posts I am doing will give you an idea of all the indoor fun we have had over the last two years. Yes, two years is a very long time but I will try my best to sum it up.

Outdoor Fun Review

This is the first post of my review on the past two years. Here I will share some of the fun we have had outdoors.

Almost 2 years ago, a healthy baby boy joined our family. I spent a lot of time baby wearing.

We fed the ducks.

We climbed trees.

We went fruit picking.

We went to see where our vegetable boxes come from.

We did a cooking class at Tyntesfield, one of our local National Trust properties.

We played in dens.

We jumped in leaves.

We played with water.

We went pond dipping.

We played in muddy streams.

We jumped in puddles.

We made fires.

We watched a battle reenactment.

We grew our own fruit and vegetables.

Riyad tried to cut worms out of the apples (there were no worms in the apples!)

We went to the park.

We played in the snow!

We rode on a steam train.

We rode on a miniature train.

We went to the beach.

And enjoyed many wonderful family days out.

What do you and your children like to do outdoors?

A new start

How has it been almost two years since I last posted?! Time slips by so fast you could just blink and miss it. The last two years have definitely been a roller coaster ride. Welcoming a new baby, business ventures came and went, my eldest went to school and then we went back to home educating again, I stopped my PhD and now we are finally beginning to settle down into an enjoyable and happy routine. I finally feel like I know where we are going. 

I have decided it is time to start blogging again. I find it such a useful way to document our day to day happenings and share my knowledge and experiences in the hope that someone out there may find it useful. I have enjoyed looking back at my old blog posts over the last few weeks and reminiscing about days gone by.

As so much time has passed since my last post, I am going to start by writing a post or two about what we have been up to over the past two years. It's a review of our lives which will help you to get up to date with what we have been up to and allow me to piece together our journey that has led us to the place we are now.

Here goes....

Making necklaces with beads

                  

Threading beads is a great activity that helps your child develop fine motor skills. I purchased some pony beads in a myriad of colours which the children could not resist getting their hands on! I have some plastic needles suitable for young children which I thought would be a good way for the children to use for threading the beads onto the wool.

                            

D loved picking out her favourite beads and threading them onto the wool. She made an extremely long necklace which she often wears.



                            

R surprised me by also being very good at threading the beads onto the wool using the needle. However, with his short attention span he got bored after a while so did not manage to finish his project. I left it in the bead box and he goes back to it from time to time to add more beads.

Mosque sponge painting

           

Recently I have not been blogging as much as I would like to. I guess having a newborn as well as two older children does not give me much time for blogging at the moment. However, I now have a bit of a backlog of things to post about so I'd better get started!

This is an activity we did months ago. A lovely craft activity we found on a wonderful blog called Karima's crafts. We used homemade stencils to sponge paint onto black card to create this scene of a mosque at night. The original post can be found here.

               

I drew a mosque outline onto some card and then cut it out to create a stencil. I did the same for the stars and moon. Then I stuck the stencils onto some black card as I knew R wouldn't be able to hold it still on the paper.

                 

Using grey paint, R painted the mosque onto the card using a sponge brush.

         

I found some glow-in-the-dark paint for him to use to paint the stars and moon so that they would glow at night like the stars outside.