Happy Muslim Mama: Teaching Alphabet

I took Friday off from work to rest and good thing I did. I got a call from Little Lady’s school to come in and confirm whether we wanted the nursery place that has become available for Little Man. Did we! After all the palaver last September when he was supposed to start, we were very happy to confirm. Little Man has been ready to go school since he saw Little Lady set off for nursery.

Coincidentally, this week I also came across a link for alphabet flashcards which you can print out. The vowels were in red, but as I printed out in black and white, I marked the vowels with purple stickers. Little Lady is very keen to start teaching Little Man and he can’t wait to get started either.

I wrote these words on card and cut them out for Little Lady to practice. She can read most of them now, except awkward ones like “eyes”. At some point I will add new words for her.

As Fashionista Sister is nearly a fully-fledged teacher now insh’Allah, she has been an invaluable source of advice regarding teaching children. She also gave me this absolutely brilliant pack put together by the Department for Education and Skills for teachers, which includes guidance notes for teaching and a six phase teaching programme called “Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics”. Reading through I found it to be invaluable if you want to know more about what your child’s teacher is doing, or teach them yourself. I found a downloadable PDF version of the whole pack here.

One other thing. Despite my best efforts to avoid Christmas, Little Lady has been coming home with lots of Christmas cards. Although these will all go in the recycling bin the minute she forgets about them, some of the pictures are not too Christmassy and will be cut out and put in their craft box for scrapbooking.