Children’s workFrom the archive
Surah Az-Zalzalah, one workbook, many ways in
One of our surah workbooks, with a page for each way of learning, and Hilwaa's sheets showing how a word person grew into drawing her own earthquake.
This is one of our many surah workbooks for live workshops with children, and one of many versions of it. We kept changing them as we went. In this version, for Surah Az-Zalzalah, we brought in several subjects and ways of learning: art and craft, doodling, reflection, colour matching and more. Every page has its own purpose and its own link to a way of learning. Some of the children may already have memorised parts of the surah.
The pages
Each page is labelled with its activity:
- Art & Craft: "Unleash the Earthquake!" The child cuts a circle from hard paper, cuts a crack through the middle and fills the gap with strips of crumpled paper.
- Language: fill in the blanks, then write what two men might say to each other.
- Signs & Science: a plate-movement experiment with ice-cream sticks and a flimsy model house.
- Quran Doodling: "Draw what happens in an earthquake?"
- Quranic Literacy: word-by-word meanings, and matching the verses to their meanings.
- Social studies: the graveyards of different cultures and religions.
- Color Puzzle: colour the parts to find what is hidden.
The Language page is about an argument between two men in the time of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and it ends with "Every small deeds count!" One child filled the speech bubbles with: "Why you never say thankyou back!!!!" and "Sorry sorry, aku insaf!!"
Hilwaa: from words to pictures
Hilwaa was more of a word person. Her sheets show how she moved, slowly, into doodling and drawing, and towards understanding things more deeply.
When she was small, she joined our Al Maun Bookcamp in the Mini Junior group. On her Quran Search page the answers are in tracing letters. She circled her choices and added a small smiling face in the corner.
In 2018–2019, when she was eight or nine, she worked through this Az-Zalzalah workbook in Quran Investigators. On the Surah Hunt page she wrote that Az-Zalzalah means "earthquake", that it is surah number 99, and that it has 8 verses.
Then she drew her own earthquake: a volcano erupting, cars and a bicycle tipping on a cracking road, the word "crack" written twice, and two people, one of them crying "help". Under "What do you think you will" she wrote "dead body" for See, "thunder crash" for Hear and "100% scared" for Feel.
That is an honest answer from a child of eight or nine thinking about what the surah describes. Put next to her Al Maun pages, it shows the change: the answers are no longer traced, and the whole scene is her own.
