How to start teaching your child to read Arabic at home!

So your child has just learnt all their Arabic alphabet sounds and they are ready to move on to reading Arabic, where to next? This post will outline how to start teaching your child to read Arabic at home in fun and easy ways using interactive resources  – some free and some bought! If you have just landed on this post and are looking for how to begin teaching the Arabic Alphabet home – click on my previous post here.

Step #1 – Introduce the beginning letter form

Start by introducing the beginning form of the Arabic letters along with recapping the whole letter sounds too. Unlike English, Arabic letters sometimes look completely different when joint together in a word – it’s a bit like really difficult joined up English hand-writing. Therefore, it’s important to teach your child how the letters connect. I highly recommend these lovely Arabic Alphabet Snap cards by Iqra Games. They come in mini card sizes (smaller than a normal pack of cards size) in different colours for each letter form – beginning, middle and end. There are suggestions to play a number of different games including snap and the memory game which are 2 of our faves. It’s best to let your children get confident with the beginning Arabic letter form first (red cards below) – so they don’t get so confused with the middle and end letter forms. It’s also good to highlight that there are some letters that do not change or connect to other Arabic letters -these letters are special is the best explanation! 🙂

Step #2 – Fun & Easy matching activities

A great follow up activity to help your child recognise the Arabic alphabet beginning forms is with this cool activity below. We modified this activity from this awesome book Teach Your Child to Read Arabic in 10 EASY Lessons. I love how this book Umm Summaya uses montessori methods to teach Arabic! We cut them up and laminated them to use as a peg the correct letter activity. It works well as a matching the beginning Arabic letter form to the Arabic whole letter.

Step #3 – Use phonic knowledge to sound out and blend to read!

Introduce sounding out of Arabic letters to build words. I absolutely loved this phonics style activity from  Teach Your Child to Read Arabic in 10 EASY Lessons. So we printed it and laminated them! It’s great to practise the Arabic letter sounds and then blending to read just like we would in phonics in English. At this stage it isn’t necessary for your child to know about the tashkeel (dhamma, fat-ha, kasrah). They can sound out the letters and you can correct it for blending without going into details on tashkeel. Our main focus in this stage is letter sound recognition and connecting letter forms.

Step #4 – Build the words!

The next step is a fun activity where children are encouraged to build the words using Montessori style Arabic letter connectors (Yomna bought these pictured from Egypt). Alternatively You can check out the awesome Arabic Letter Connector I have from Ilm projects, or even Arabic Letters Cubes. All these work in pretty much the same way to help your child build the Arabic connector letters to make words.

Step #5 – Reading new vocabulary with object clues!

At this stage, you will want your child to read to understand some of the vocabulary too. So you can simply write out simple 3 letter Arabic words (a list will be sent out in our newsletter – be sure to subscribe below!) and once they sound out the letters and blend, they can pick out the correct object from a basket to match the word.

Step #6 – Listening activities & pronunciation!

Children (and even adults) can find the similar sounding letters in Arabic confusing. So this activity we do below with the kids is fabulous! The children listen to word being said and peg the letter. You can find this to download for free on here. These resources along with many more are absolutely FREE shared by a sister who posts her resources on her Facebook group called Arabic Worksheets.

Step #7 – Introduce the tashkeel starting with Fat-ha!

I started this step by making my own very basic tashkeel letters on coloured card. Alternatively you can download and print the free flashcards with tashkeel by a Muslim Homeschool too! You can go through the sounds individually or mix it up and put 2 to 3 cards at a time to see if your child can connect the dots between the letter sound + fat-ha + then the next letter with fat’ha. Remember to start slow and work at your child’s pace. Below are pictures of some zigzag booklets I made when introducing the fat’ha to Ammarah 🙂 You can also bring back the montessori style connector letters or even the  Arabic Letter Connector from Ilm projects (which also includes the tashkeel). I have also recommended the Ajmal Al Qawaaid book to help those who want their children to begin reading Arabic to access the Qur’an.

Step #8 – Check out our fave Arabic resources to help with teaching your child to read Arabic below!

We recommend:

1. Arabic Alphabet for Kids with Animals – Learn Arabic ABC with Zakaria – a lovely video which goes through the tashkeel of each letter and some vocabulary.
2. Arabic Worksheets Facebook Group – Here you’ll find a lot of free worksheets for all kinds of Arabic learning!
3. Dr Laura’s Kitchen has a cute section on making little Arabic vocabulary books. Our girls really enjoyed making these! (although the site is in Arabic – it is fairly easy to download the resources because of the pictures attached!)
4. Mona’s Bonyan Academy featuring Montessori style Arabic resources to help with reading as in the picture below! (Her website is in Arabic) – you can email her for more info and find her on Facebook too.
5. Gambian Mommy’s superb, colourful resources for letter connecting and so much more!

What’s more is we even dedicated our Tuesday Teaching Tips video to reading in Arabic this week. For more on how to teach Arabic to your child at home! Watch below – Subscribe to my Youtube channel so you never miss a video!

This post and video above was in collaboration with Yomna from @happyhomelearning  – you can follow her on her instagram page!

You can download our FREE Arabic teaching resources below including a vocabulary list for each Arabic letter and Arabic letter writing sheets. 🙂

Arabic Letters Tracing Sheet

Arabic Letters sheet

Arabic Vocab linked to teaching the Arabic Alphabet

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