Tired of wondering what to teach your little ones at home? Why don’t you follow this wonderful theme all about “Saudi Arabia?”

This post give you a thorough outline on what to teach each week in all areas of learning!

If you are reading this page and are looking for Part 1 – click here.

So to continue with this Homeschooling Theme on Saudi Arabia. We will be looking at week 3 and 4 of our learning. Just a reminder that week 1 was all about where Saudi Arabia was and the importance of Makkah. Week 2 looked in depth at the history of Makkah and ritual of Hajj. So like before I will layout the post showing what we did in the last 2 weeks.

Week 3: The Desert and Culture

In this week we wanted to focus more on the desert and the Bedouin culture. We started by setting up a tent area in our play rooms. Keeping with the traditional black tents decorated with red carpets and majlis (seating area).

As we learnt more and more about the culture we set up and included further items that by the end of the week we had prepared for a dress up Bedouin day. The children came in dressed up as Beduoins and role-played a pretend desert trip and bumping into Bedouins. We prepared the children throughout the week and then they got into role on the day. Here are some of the crafts and dress-up pictures:

Above: We weaved palm tree branches to make bracelets – I had made a pencil pot holder over the weekend to show the children what the Bedouins do with the palm tree branches (they make baskets). We made date ball treats and a camel sand craft.

We also discovered a lovely craft in our Desert book – and the children folded paper to make palm trees:

Literacy:

Our 3 -4 year olds focused on letters d, g, this week:

Our 4-5 year olds working on sounds h, b, f, ff, l, ll this week

Maths:

We learnt about wholes and halves this week using wooden fractions box, a few practical activities including peeling oranges and halving them.

Arabic & Islamic Studies:

We looked at letters Alif to Jeem with our younger group in Arabic, while our 4-5 year olds looked at letter forms this week.

Week 4: Under The Red Sea

In our final week on Saudi Arabia, we wanted to capture the beach life and under the sea theme. So once again we transformed our play room into a beach play area complete with a wall display created by Ammarah, Hibah and I, a beach tent (that’s how its done here) and a sensory box from all things from the sea.

We began by sorting all our creatures into under the sea creatures and the ones that were not!

We followed by looking deeply at the sea and the sea bed. So we made under the sea sensory bottles, using real sand, coloured small stones, sea shells, blue coloured water, green glitter as sea weed and a little bit of oil on top. We stuck some fish stickers on the outside.

We finished the week by making a sensory arts and craft sea shore beach picture using real sand, real small sea shells, sponge painting the sea using a wavy sponge and finally sticking from fish on top.

Literacy:

Our 3-4 year olds moved on to letters o and c. Conveniently worked nicely with our under the sea theme.

Then for the letter c we read about The very Hungry Caterpillar and finished with a letter c letter craft using green stickers and fingerpainting the red head.

Our 4-5 year olds were learning about letters j, v, w, x. They attempted to draw pictures and write the words by sounded out too.

Maths & Science: 

This week in maths we had to look at volume  and capacity, measuring in cups and containers and finding out which container holds the most amount of water. We introduced words such as full, half full, empty, half empty, nearly full and nearly empty. The children enjoyed playing with water and the practical and sensory element of our learning this week.

We also planned some fine motor skills activities for our younger learners, using coloured water, plastic egg trays and pipettes, their challenge was to fill their egg trays with water by using the pipettes to squeeze the water into their trays. The concentration for this challenge was just amazing! We also froze some fish to see how water changes to ice, they then had to help melt the ice using salt water!

Arabic & Islamic Studies:

We read the story of Prophet Yunus (alayhis salaam) in the lovely book by Zanib Mian called Migo and Ali, Love for the Prophets. In Arabic we continued the letter forms and began some conversational Arabic asking questions about the beach (and about the desert too in last week’s session) which the children have been enjoying!

So that pretty much sums up our whole month theme on Saudi Arabia. Ideally I would have ended this unit with a weekend trip to the beach in Jeddah or if your abroad, a trip to the aquarium would be nice! Hoping the ideas have been helpful – we thoroughly enjoyed this theme! Thank you for reading – and if you have any questions regarding our Saudi Arabia Theme learning please feel free to get in touch!