Nature Challenge and First Poem!

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Qatar Museum Authority has invited us to participate in their Nature Challenge that would be going on for the next 4 months and we are hoping to participate Inshaa Allaah. Each month they give us a topic or a challenge and the participants Ages 4 - 12 residing in Qatar can submit (online) a poem or an artwork based on the monthly theme. A child can submit any number of entries. A winner will be selected for each month. Winners would be awarded a Nature Kit in April 2014 Inshaa Allaah.

Here is a brief detail about the Challenge taken from their website

This competition is intended to engage children in Qatar with nature and the world around them.

Our hope is that children will create a community map, showing the world as they see, imagine,

and dream it to be. Please support your students and children by helping them to understand the

monthly challenge and encourage their creative responses with artwork, poems, or short stories. 

Please remember, each entry must be a child’s original work based on the monthly theme in

order to be valid. 

More details could be found here.

This month's Challenge is 

"Imagine your favorite green space in Qatar. What does it look like? Why do you enjoy going there?"

I told Maimoonah about this whole thing today and explained to her and showed what other kids have uploaded. She was very excited and liked the whole idea. Since I know Maimoonah does not write poems, I have been cracking my mind thinking what kind of artwork would be best for the theme and in fact asked another dear sister to send me some ideas from a book that she had with her as well. (Jazzakillaah Khayr for sending me sis it was helpful for us even though we did not do them). But surprisingly she wanted to enter the competition but opted to write a poem for this month!

Now, we have been studying about few poems in the Nelson English Book for the last few months. I like the way they introduce this subject in this book, where they make it easy for kids to attempt writing poems. Especially this one!

 

But even though she writes many stories and uses lots of new vocabularies, so far she has not written any poems. Any way Alhamdulillaah I though this is an opportunity to enhance this skill as she is saying she wants to submit a poem and an artwork every month Inshaa Allaah.

So the first thing I did was asking her to choose her favourite green space in Qatar. She chose Dahl Al Hamam Park. This is a beautiful park known as the "House of the Doves". If you go to the link above you will know the history of it!

Then I told her to write down the two important things that she needs to include in the poem according to the theme and list them. 

While she was writing, we were discussing about all what she used to do in the park, her feelings, what she sees there and how well we use poetry to express this and so on... I have been thinking for sometime when is she really going to embark on writing poems and Alhamdulillaah this challenge came at the right time.

Then I told her now think of lines and rhyming words and include all what you have listed in a very nice interesting way and reminded her not to forget the Creator of all those lovely things she has listed.

So she wrote.

Dahl Al Hamam Park

A Feeling of Bliss,

Happiness in this,

Bending trees greet me,

Cats eating popcorns,

Looking cheekily at me.

Little spooky woods,

Mysterious cave,

Grass like waves,

A sandy playground,

All make me laugh.

I adore....

sledding down the hills,

Rolling over with pals,

Picnic with family,

Feeding chirping birds,

play with sand

And dawdle back home

Thanking my Lord!

Then we went outside on a nature walk to collect some items that we could use for decoration. She collected dead grass, sticks. feathers and fallen flowers. Thats all we could find! 

Then she used them to decorate her poem. This is the final product!

 

Then she typed out the information and a brief description about her entry and uploaded a picture for the competition.