Pen Pals!

Alhamdulillaah sister Umm Suhailah at Mariam Poppins  was busy enough to organize a pen pal club with kids participating from around the world! The goal for this was to connect the hearts of the Muslim community throughout the world starting at an early age. Also to get kids to write and practice their writing skills! A fun and stress free way to get the not so enthusiastic writers to write.

At every age and stage kids get into a phase where they just refuse to write and get bored with writing and most of the time its frustrating to us to get the work done. But the solution I think and I found productive is not to nag but to let go and use other ways and means to get them to write, when they love to write something, they really write with lot of effort put into it. If you give them to do some writing in a workbook its always a tug of war if they are experiencing this phase of not willing to write.

Maimoonah too was going through this stage where she was making excuses not to write, and at that time Umm Suhailah came up with this Pen Pals idea and Alhamdulillaah it worked really well. Maimoonah got two pen pals from UK and the US.

She took lot of effort and wrote the letters, decorated them and also made some Thank You cards for them for being her pen pals.

We used our Writing Resource Book and I first explained to her how we write a letter. Stressed the fact that we follow the suunah of the Messenger of Allaah (writing the basmalah and addressing it and informing from who the letter is) in writing letters, spoke about how the Messenger of All used to instruct to write letters to his scribes that were sent to many kings calling them to Islaam.

Since we were also in Colombo at that time, she was able to visit a Post Office and see around what happens there. She stood in line got the stamps, pasted and saw the letters she wrote going into the post box. And she was thrilled when she knew her pen pals have received her letters and she was thrilled to receive letters from them too.

What she received from her pen pal from UK

 

Another way to make kids write is also to provide them with materials that are interesting like beads, stickers, notebooks with interesting pictures and stencils. I gave these stuff to Maimoonah and she uses all of this and draws and writes something or the other when she is bored. This one below is some things about Sri Lanka...

After writing letters to pen pals she actually got out of the phase of not willing to write. Writing became nicer and the process of writing was not as bad as before, by the Mercy of Allaah. And I know she will go through this stage again and we have to keep finding interesting ways and means to get her out of it from it Inshaa Allaah! The struggle continues..... :  )