19 Oct Structuring Quran lessons for children
“How do you structure your Quran class and what are the ages of your children?”
Here’s an old post I wrote 4 years ago, on how I started homeschooling Quran when my children were younger:
~~~
Alhamdulillah my children are now almost 7, 5, 4, and just over 1.
This is how I structure our Quran class currently:
We begin our homeschool day with Quran class as the first period. After the kids finish eating breakfast and then doing their chores (inshaAllah a separate post on chores later), we start homeschool.
I follow something akin to the kuttab (كُتّاب) method in Egypt, where you have multiple children all seated together memorizing through repetition with a teacher.
More specifically, I follow the same method that my own father followed in teaching me and my siblings Quran, which is the same method his mother followed and also her father. My paternal grandmother and her father were both huffadh of the Quran alhamdulillah, and they founded a كتاب / kuttab in our town in Egypt back in their day to teach children Quran.
This is a three-part system: there is the luh (لوح) which is the new material being just now memorized for the first time, then there is the maady qareeb (الماضي القريب) which is the “recent past,” ie the surahs you just finished memorizing most recently, and then there is the maady ba’eed (الماضي البعيد) which is “the distant past,” which is the surahs you memorized before.
To make it more concrete, this is what it would look like as an example: say you had finished memorizing the last 2 juz of the Quran and were about to start juz 28. Your new material would be surat At-Tahreem. Everything behind this surah is what you’ve memorized before, so we would split that in half into 2 blocks. Juz 29, from surat Al-Mulk to surat Al-Mursalaat, would be your recent past. Juz 30, from surat An-Nabaa to An-Nas, would be your distant past.
You’d work on 3 different surahs simultaneously: your new portion in surat At-Tahreem, your recent review of surat A-Mulk, and your distant review of surat An-Nabaa. Then, surat at-Tahreem, al-Qalam, and An-Naazi’at. And so on. You would keep going this way every week, progressing with both new and old material.
Anyway, this is not quite as relevant for my kids currently, as they are very young and are just at the start of their Quran journey. But inshaAllah this is the system I will have them follow as they get older and progress, with the will and mercy of Allah.
In our current situation, we start with some review first. I call on each child to recite a certain surah from the previously memorized bank of surahs, usually not in any particular order. Depending on our schedule that day and how my 1-year-old is behaving, each child recites between 1 and 5 or 6 surahs for review.
Next, I have each child recite the surah we are currently working on. This is the most recently memorized material. For us right now, this is surat Al-Balad. After each child has recited what we’ve learned of it so far, we go into the new material, the verse(s) of the day. Depending on the length of the verses in any given surah, usually we learn 1 or 2 ayaat as new material.
I recite the new verse, and explain the meaning in a brief, kid-friendly tafseer session. I try to give examples from their everyday life to make things more relatable and easily understood. This part often naturally turns into an animated discussion about various topics; sometimes it is stories about people like Abu Lahab, or accounts of historical events like the incident with Abraha and his elephant and army attempting to destroy the Ka’ba, or ideas like imaan (belief/ knowledge of Allah), kufr (denial/ disbelief in Allah), the aakhirah, the dunya, Shaytan, the angels.
I use this session to also grow their vocabulary because they encounter, through the new verses, new words that I define. I also use this session to teach them أدب, adab/ manners, and social etiquette, like how we should deal with the less fortunate (like اليتيم, the orphan, or المسكين, the poor or helpless) in Surat Al-Maa’un, or how to avoid envy (الحسد) in Surat Al-Falaq, or how to share what we have and not be stingy in Surat Al-Humazah.
Of course, this part isn’t always possible, but it’s fun whenever we can do it. I want them to understand what they are saying when they memorize, even if it’s a simple understanding.
Then each child repeats the new verse until it comes easily and is memorized. Then we tie it back to the rest of the surah so the new verse is anchored to it firmly. This part can take longer or shorter amounts of time depending on the difficulty level.
A disclaimer: I don’t want to give an overly rosy picture of things. The reality sometimes matches exactly the ideal layout I describe above, but sometimes it doesn’t. Of course my kids are still young, so they can sometimes be restless and fidgety, or try to whisper or giggle with one another while the third kid is reciting, or have a tantrum because they made a mistake and I corrected them. Not to mention my one-year-old, who is supposed to be playing near us but often goes rogue and brings toys to his big siblings which they play with, or needs a diaper change or wants to nurse, or just cries for no discernible reason. That all happens too. We just try our best.
–
By: Umm Khalid (source: Facebook)
No Comments