Gifts From Allah Lapbook

This lapbook is based around one very simple concept, that we have so many gifts from Allah that it is impossible to list them all, and that we need to be grateful to Allah (swt) for all the blessings we have.

On the lapbook cover “And if you try to list Allah’s favors, you will never be able to count them all.” Quran 14:34

There are many, many ideas that could be included in this lapbook. We did mini books to illustrate a few ideas and then decorated the lapbook to illustrate others. Once you start to discuss and think about all the gifts that Allah (swt) bestows on us, the children themselves will come up with lots of suggestions, inshAllah.

To illustrate and strengthen understanding of blessings from Allah I used some old lesson plans, written some years ago by another friend.

For example, whenthinking about our hands as a blessing from Allah I began the session by putting thick mittens on the girls’ hands, then asking them to perform tasks such as picking upsmall objects, putting on and fastening their coats and shoes, etc. Of course they found this impossible, and they could then begin to realise how important agift our hands are to us, and then be thankful forthem.

when thinking about our tongues, I asked them to try to say certain words and sentences withoutmoving their tongues at all. I asked them to say words such as “little” without letting their tongues touch their teeth. Through these activities they came to realise the importance of the tongue for speech.

similarly when learning about the eyes, I blindfolded the girls and asked them to perform certain tasks, such as reading, and recognising a person without touching or hearing them. These kinds of activities can be extended to include any other parts of the body you wouldlike to study, legs, lungs, ears etc.

Each time I got the girls to think of a list of things theywould not be able to do without their hands, eyes etc.

The tongue shape lifts up!

I did not only want to focus on parts of the body however. We chose to also domini books about water, and the seasons. When learning about water we thought about all the uses for water that we have, and how much we need it every day, indeed , how all living things need water to live. The study of water could be a whole otherproject, so we could only cover it briefly here.

We wrote about wateron the back of a droplet shape.

My daughter also wanted to draw about the seasons. She especially wanted to draw about ice creams, to represent the summer!

We also made lists of gifts from Allah to stick into the lapbook. Some of the gifts from Allah are not easy to illustrate!

Our list: my body, my health, my family, my friends, the Muslim Ummah, my Islamic belief, fresh air, sunlight, food, night and day.

For each of these we were able to discuss what these meant to us.

When my friend wrote lesson plans around this topic she extended it to cover some of the amazing attributes that Allah (swt) has given to His creation in the animal kingdom, for example the ability of some ants to always find their way back home, the long distance flights of the albatross, and the ability of the camel to go for days in the desert without water. I felt that this was too much for this lapbook, indeed the topic deserves a lapbook of its own. Maybe I’ll make one, inshAllah!