Wise Poet - Introduction to Poetry

Assalamu alaykum

Here is one of the club activities that we did today. The other was a really cool ancient math activity.

We are going to start doing monthly writing projects, insha'Allah. The plan is to collect the children's writings and arrange them into a book insha'Allah.

To introduce poetry, we learned the story of Al-Tufayl (ra), one of the companions of the Prophet (as). He was a well-known poet who embraced Islam and made successful daw'ah to his people, the Daws.
Information was taken from the children's book "the Wise Poet" by Khurram Murad.

To learn the story (without reading it straight... because that doesn't work well with our group sometimes), the story was summarized and split into sections. The children's job was to work together to put the sections in the right order by focusing on the story line.

After they put the first half of the story in order, we shared the end of the story - about how Tufayl called his people to Islam. (First in a harsh and unsuccessful way... and then after being advised by the Prophet, as, he successfully called them to Islam with good manners and compassion.)

Once we finished learning his story, we introduced poetry. And as a group, we made our first poem! We wrote Tufayl's name (TUFAYL) vertically and worked together to followed each letter with a phrase that described who he was and what he did.

The writing project for this week is for each child to compose this type of poem using their own first name. We reminded the children about the importance of avoiding self-praise. We encouraged them to write traits that they may aspire to have, or write phrases that describe who they are.

If you missed club today, you can still encourage your child to participate in this project. We will share our poems at the next club day insha'Allah and also collect a copy of each poem so that we can start compiling the book insha'Allah.