SCHOOL FEATURE SPECIAL! - Our Maarif Experience
Doing creative and fun activities has proven to help educators and learners cover and understand various subjects. According to Morgan (2019), the Director of Special Projects at the Arts Council of England, “It’s become clearer than ever that we must prioritise teaching for creativity to meet our future needs and to give all children the opportunities they deserve.” And here in Arabic Anonymous, we are all for AWESOMENESS in learning the Arabic Language.
We love to discover the best ways possible for Arabic learners of all ages to learn the language. Hence, we curate a series of programs for our learners to go through, from Sprouting Seed, to Blooming Rose.
Our program received its first attention by a full time madrasah here in the heart of Singapore. Madrasah Al-Maarif Al-Islamiah engaged us for their Primary 3 CCA & Primary 1 Post Exam Activity back in 2020. Through a course of 8 sessions for the Primary 3 girls & a one day session for the Primary 1 girls, we played, acted, created, story tell, and most importantly learned Arabic together. With a total of 136 enthusiastic participants, our 4 trainers were excited to interact with our learners in as much Arabic as possible.
We incorporated Drama & Visual Arts in our approach to teach our learners Arabic. As a drama & design trained educator, our founder Ms. Mawaddah ensured that the sessions are kept alive with plenty of hands-on and activities that promote the use of the Arabic language itself. Doing these activities help to communicate to learners that Arabic is used beyond the context of religion.
We made crafts such as puppets using sandwich bags and headbands of animals and other props for role-play. We invited our learners to present their products to the whole class, as different products carry a different story. They reenacted the story with the headbands on their head and the puppets on their hands. ALL IN ARABIC!
We also played games like charade where we acted out some attributes and asked the students to guess them in Arabic. Other games that we played included sequencing cards where students need to arrange the keyword or story cards followed by retelling the story in their own words.
We understand the struggle that some learners may face when it comes to telling a story. We therefore ask them what were their greatest challenges in retelling the story. We received multiple responses and we chose a few to address, like voice projection as well as facial expression practice.
We then invited them to recreate their own song using different animals, its character and what it does, by using one main song we previously sang together. We were very surprised by how creative the girls were! It was so refreshing to see them come up with their own songs and stories and sportingly sharing it with the whole class!
When learners are given the opportunity to create and own their learning, they usually live up to it Ma Sha Allah. Our role as educators is to provide them with the opportunities and give them the tools to enjoy and succeed in their learning. And this year, we are excited to continue providing the girls of Maarif with the skills to enjoy growing in awesomeness in Arabic together!
We look forward to future collaboration with you!
~ Reported by Mawaddah Ismail & Munira Ramlee.
To engage us for your school workshops, simply drop us an email at admin@arabicanonymous.com
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