Quotations

Asalm alykom:

Here is an Islam related writing asignment for higher grades. My son is in 6th grade and he was able to do it. Quotations can sometimes be difficult. Once the student learns the basic rules, he or she just needs practice writing with quotations to get better. I had my son take a situation or story from hadith or Quran that involves a conversation. Some examples would be the conversation of the prophet Sulayman and the hud-hud bird, prophet Ibraheem and his son, or Prophet Dawood and Goliath. We used these situations because at the time we were studying the history of Mesopotomia and the history involves the Biblical prophets and their stories.

The Sweetness of Faith

Assalm alykom:

The Prophet Muhammad(Peace be upon him) said: There are three qualities that if a person has them, they will taste the sweetness of faith. These three qualities are:

1. A person must love Allah and His messenger more than he loves anything else.

2. A person hates to go back to disbelief as much as he hates to be thrown into the Hell Fire.

3. A person loves another for the sake of Allah.

I used this hadeeth to create a really great writing assignment for my students. I told them that if they could taste the sweetness of faith, what would it taste like. They needed to write me one paragraph describing what the sweetness of faith would taste like. To give you an idea of what to expect from the writing, most of my students wrote that it would taste like a sweet they liked. Most of them put some type of cake, ice cream or candy. However, some where very creative and descriptive about it. These students stood out from the rest with creativity. This assignment would probably be good for grades starting out at 6th and up. It takes a little more maturity to relate food with something that we cannot touch. Therefore, it may be difficult for a student below that grade. I thought that this assignment really caused them to reflect on how wonderful faith really is for a person. Faith is compared to the taste of something sweet, and I think that most all children love anything sweet! Let me know how some of your kids do with this prompt!

The Color of Hunger

Assalm alykom:

I teach 6th and 7th grade Lanuage Arts at an Islamic school. I have created many writing prompts this year, and I thought I would post them on my blog. All of these prompts are mostly for Middle School aged students.

The Color of Hunger was a prompt that I did during the month of Ramadan. I told the students to think of hunger as if it were a color and not a feeling. If hunger were a color, what color would it be? I made them write me a paragraph describing what color they thought hunger would represent, and why did they pick that particular color.

Many of the responses from the students were black because they felt dark when they were hungry. Some of them said white because it made them feel empty. Try this out with your kids and see what they think. I think this writing prompt works best when the student is fasting. You might try it in Ramadan with your students.