Hajj Lapbook

Assalamu alaikom everyone,

Note: Eid ul Adha is in two days, Hajj starts today, and we've been working on this project for two weeks.  I know it won't be very useful for any Muslim families right now, but hopefully it will give you some ideas for next Eid. 

In the Land of Homeschool there is something called Lapbooking.  I had never heard of it before I started homeschooling, and it took quite a bit of clicking around for me to understand what it is.  Once I figured it out, I figured it wasn't anything I'd be doing often.  See, it's a super creative and labor intensive project involving cutting, pasting, coloring, and folding.  You create a large lapbook (usually made out of two manila folders pasted together) that has smaller flipbooks, pockets, accordian books, and other media inside of it to represent a whole unit, book, or topic.  You take your time building the little parts (by reading and learning about them), and finally you have a keepsake of everything you've learned. 

My beef with the lapbook is that it looks like a project that older elementary kids wouldn't enjoy, but the work necessary to produce one is too advanced for a young elementary student to do independently.  Enter Mom. 

Well, a few weeks ago I was cruising the net, looking to some of my favorite bloggers for a good way to make a unit for Hajj and Eid.  Wouldn't ya know, it was a lapbook that really drew my attention.  I decided to go for it mostly b/c I wanted something fun and that would hold their attention continually for two weeks on this subject.  We read from a book I have on Hajj that bought a couple of years ago.  We also spent time talking about the little aspects that are represented in the lapbook.  Some of them were really easy for my 4th and 5th graders.  There were sections about the Animals for Slaughter and the Colors of Hajj.  Not exciting for the older kids, but I had them write the names of the animals and the names of the colors in Arabic on the cut-out cards.  We also added a few little speech bubbles with writing in Arabic for "Allahu Akbar", "SubhanAllah", "Alhamdulillaah", and "La Ilaaha Il Allah".  That was good practice for them, and it was something they could paste on their book.

I got all the help from http://imanshomeschool.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/hajj-mini-lapbook/ and from the original source: http://ummabdulbasir.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/hajj-lapbook-updated/

Here are the finished products from my three.

You can kind of tell which one belongs to the boy, which one belongs to the youngest one, and which one is made from the artistic child!  For a first attempt, I'm happy with the outcomes.  The ones on the links above my pictures look much nicer, but that's ok with me :D  I'm just glad we got it done.

Happy Eid!