Everyday Arabic Book 7 - Spices

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

This is the review of Book 7 in the Everyday Arabic Series by Taalib Al-Ilm Educational Resources.

This simple sentence book has images of common spices along with their English & Arabic names, and the colors of the different spices in both languages in color coded sentences.

The first page has the chart with all words used in the book.

The book has the names of some spices such as dill, mustard, mint, fennel, white pepper, cloves and cardamom etc. Additionally it gives information of the colours and types of spices as to whether it is whole, crushed, ground or flakes. Isn't it so wonderful to learn all of this in Arabic? 

I like the idea of introducing spices for the kids as this can lead to lot of discussions and findings. We as Asians use a lot of spices in our food and each of my family member like my mom, mother in law and different aunties are well known for cooking food with their favourite different spices. Talking about spices with Maimoonah also helps me to talk about extended family members especially because we do not see them that often due to living away from home. Knowing the spices in Arabic just extends the conversation Maashaa Allaah!

At the end of the book you get few interesting activities such as identifying the spices as to whether they are ground or flakes or whole or crushed.

This book could be purchased here for a reasonable price.

To make the learning more productive you can actually do many nice things with spices. With small kids you can integrated it to learning about the senses. You can make smell jars with different spices and get the kids to identify each spice after blind folding them. Same would be great with older kids too. 

The next best thing would be cooking a Biryani or Majboosh with your kids as most of the spices mentioned in the book are used for these dishes. Have some quality and yummy time with your kids while revising the vocabulary.

You can also take your kids to a spice market where they can experience seeing the spices and how they are stored, displayed and sold. If you are in Doha, Souq Waqif would be a nice place to take your kids especially with this cool weather Alhamdulillaah!

What other ways you could think of using this book? Comment and share! Watch out for the Giveaway on Monday Inshaa Allaah and it will last for only three days. So make sure you come over here and check the Giveaway post to enter it and win the whole set of Everyday Arabic Books Inshaa Allaah!