Five Fun Tips to Teach Kids Arabic

AyaKhalil | December 12, 2011 | Comments (10)

 

I have been teaching Arabic at my local mosque’s Sunday school for a couple of months, and it has been a rewarding experience thus far. I am teaching 17 kindergarteners the Arabic alphabet  and vocabulary. It has been pretty challenging to find useful resources online to teach Arabic to little kids so I have been coming up with my own ideas for lesson plans and activities. Here are some tips to make teaching Arabic fun and enjoyable for kids:

 5 Fun Tips to Teach Kids Arabic

1. Visuals- Make posters and hang them up around your classroom with the Arabic letters and examples of words that begin with those letters. Print out coloring sheets of an animal or a fruit that begin with the letter you are teaching that day and have the kids color them.
2. Movement- Kids don’t like to sit down for a long period of time. So standing up and teaching the kids the letter “alef” and having them repeat  the word “arnab” (bunny) after you 100 hundred times might be slightly boring. Try doing “heads, shoulders, knees and toes” in an Arabic version like in this video. Or try playing “Duck, Duck, Goose,” but with two different animal words in Arabic; they absolutely love this game!
3. Singing- Kids love to sing. Singing actually helps kids recall different words. I found some neat Arabic alphabet songs (or nasheed) on YouTube, like this. Play it a couple of times at the beginning of class and have the kids repeat it. They can use this at the end-of-school event or Eid party, too!
4. Creativity- Be creative and think outside the box. You know how kids love to play “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”? I had my students play “Pin the Tail on the Wolf” a couple of weeks ago, and they loved it! We were on the letter “thal” (equivalent to “th”) and tail and wolf both start with that letter in Arabic. Each child had to say those two words before getting blindfolded to pin the tail.
5. Have fun- Kids don’t want to come to Sunday school and sit down for three hours straight to listen to lectures. They already go to school five days a week and have all sorts of homework to do. One must be careful to not make the kids hate coming to Sunday school and hate learning Arabic. Make your lessons fun. Find good English lesson plans and try to modify that to an Arabic lesson plan.

This article was first published at www.americanmuslimmom.com