Learning from our teachers

Much of what IqraSaurus makes started with someone who taught us. This post is about some of them, and about what we made after learning from them.

Sister Azrina's worksheets

In 2015 and 2016 our two eldest children studied in Johor Bahru, and Sister Azrina of Mount Safa became one of our mentors. We learned a lot from her and her colleagues.

Her Islamic Studies booklet was drawn and written by hand. It has fill-in-the-blank pages on the stories of the prophets: Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him) and the idols, Prophet Yunus (peace be upon him) and the whale, Prophet Nuh (peace be upon him) and the ship, and Prophet Isma'il (peace be upon him) with Zamzam and the Ka'bah. A child filled in the blanks, and the pages were marked in red, with star stamps on the cover.

Her worksheets made the stories easy to understand, interactive and fun. They are what inspired us to make our own versions. The booklet is her work, so we describe it here rather than show it.

Dr Syafiee and the hifz logbook

Dr Syafiee is our teacher and mentor. He taught us the memorisation method he used with his own eleven children, all of whom became huffaz of the Quran. It works in chunks and cycles. You read one verse five times with your eyes open, five times with them closed, five open, five closed and five open again, to make 25. By then, that line should already be memorised. Then you do the same with chunks of lines. At a basic level it is 20 to 25 repetitions, and it can be ramped up to 60.

We turned his method into our Juz 'Amma Hifz Logbook. Its cover sets out three steps: always begin with ta'awwudh, basmalah and salawat; memorise a little every day and revise a lot; and when it gets tough, say istighfar and hawqalah. The logbook is the forerunner of our Hafiz tool, and it carries his name.

Ustaz Mohammad Asraff and Surah Al-Mulk

In 2019 we made a set of reflection pages on Surah Al-Mulk for adults. The surah has 30 verses, and we gave each verse its own blank page to fill in, one verse a day. Al-Mulk is a surah we are encouraged to read every evening. Each page follows the 4-I, with boxes for Inspire, Investigate, Integrate and Impart around the verse.

Alongside the pages is a card of Reflection Gems, one short lesson for each verse, adapted from a seminar on Surah Al-Mulk by Ustaz Mohammad Asraff. It is there as a reference and to keep us motivated.

The Sealed Nectar, mapped out

While homeschooling, we relied on good books for our storytelling. One of them was The Sealed Nectar (Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum) by Safiur Rahman Mubarakpuri, on the life of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. We mapped its chapters into timelines in Excel and Word, so that other parents could see the flow of the Prophet's ﷺ life on a one-page summary and a few pages after it. It doesn't cover anything in detail.

This is an example of not creating our own material, but making something that explains someone else's material well.

We also made a 3i Lesson Planner. It lists all 114 surahs with their meanings and the book titles of Sahih Bukhari, so a lesson could be planned around a surah and a chapter of hadith.

If you teach your own children, it is worth keeping a note of who taught you each method, and putting their name on what you make from it.