Assalamulaykum All!

This time of the year always seems so festive, regardless of whether or not you choose to celebrate.  Although, I personally do not like to celebrate any holiday other than our two Eids (Eid Al Fitr and Adha), I do partake in Thanksgiving more or less as a national holiday. When you live in the US,  and the entire nation is not working on this day, you tend to throw a feast and invite the entire family!  We also do cook traditional Thanksgiving foods like turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pies because everything is so readily available and delicious…so why not?!

Our Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was born in the beginning of Rabi-Ul-Awwal. As we don’t make a big deal of our family birthdays, I try to do the same with the Prophet (PBUH). However, I do love the opportunity to remind myself, family, and children of the ways and teachings of our beloved Prophet (PBUH).

This year, these two occasions, so to say, happen to be around the same time of the year. So, I decided to merge these two with an Islamic twist and make them available for everyone to download, I hope you all enjoy and share!

Let’s start with the kids free activity/printable because I’m especially excited about it! So, my thought here was to make something not too time consuming for me to ‘teach’ because I am also the host this year. I wanted it to be fun (obviously) but also informative. So I did a merge of a ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Mawlid’ activity sheet. I wanted it to resonate with the kids so focused more on the quality of the content. It includes finding opposites (from a hadith!), tracing, coloring, and some critical thinking.

I also learned something new while developing this sheet. The following hadith explains the entire story, but it got me thinking to tell the kids this story and perhaps cook some pumpkin soup and have barley bread on the side to help bring some Islamic history to life!

“Yahya related to me from Malik that Ishaq ibn Abdullah ibn Abi Talha heard Anas ibn Malik say that a certain tailor invited the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to eat some food which he had prepared. Anas said, “I went with the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to eat the food. He served barley bread and a soup with pumpkin in it. I saw the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, going after the pumpkin around the dish, so I have always liked pumpkin since that day.”” (Malik, Book 28, Hadith 28.21.51 ) 

Download the activity sheet here!

The thought of food brings me to my next few ideas! In recent gatherings, I have found it so much more organized and easy to write up some food tags to describe foods rather than keep answering “what kind of soup is this?” 20 times! So I have made some food tags to simply print, cut (card stock recommended), fold and display.  I have a generic one with tags for Turkey, Gravy, Pie, etc. here:

I also made some empty ones you can fill out by hand in case you pull off some odd combinations like I do!

I know this post is a little long, but here’s my last little treat. I usually decorate as fall comes close and when I host, I’ll admit I do get a little EXTRA with my decor. However, I am all about functionality, so my decor tends to be functional at times. Here, I have provided a super easy DIY. I have seen these made as name cards for the dining table. But let’s just put it nicely, that doesn’t work all too well with 20 kids in a house! I was torn on whether to do Dua’a cards or Reminders on how to be thankful, so I did both. I feel that most people have the Dua’a memorized but almost skim through it without meaning and that’s the reason I also made the reminder cards with a little more modern explanation.  All you need is a few cinnamon pine cones, a glue gun, and my printable here…

Reminders

Duaa before eating

Simply cut the cards and glue gun at the tip of the pine cones to display them beautifully around your house or table.

Enjoy and Share!

Your sister,

Bayan