What’s in The Munchkin’s Ramadaan Box
When we were kids the month of Ramadaan was always met with a certain sense of sadness. No TV and we couldn’t eat all day. We just couldn’t understand how adults would get excited for this month? Why even?
As a teenager I would have to sort out my video tapes and set the timer on the VCR to record Buffy and Angel AND make sure the TV was on the right channel. Do you know what a moerse effort that was?! Yoh, thank God for advances in technology y’all.
The best part was taking cookies away to the neighbours and the subsequent feast every night. Especially when Aunty Waydie made her daltjies!!! Guys, Aunty Waydie makes the BEST daltjies!
Obviously as I’ve grown up, I’ve got a new appreciation for this wonderful month and I really wish I looked forward to and loved it more as a child.
- What Ramadaan means to me
So, I’m starting a little tradition for my kids: a Ramadaan box filled with things to help them see that this month is more than just not eating and not watching TV. I hope this cultivates a love for this beautiful month for them.
So after looking around on the world wide interwebs this is what I’ve come up with:
Ramadaan Books
I’ve included two books: My First Ramadaan and Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns.
The first one explains what we do during this month in a child-friendly way. He’s obviously not fasting yet being 3.5 years old but I don’t want him to be oblivious about it all and want to include him where we can.
Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns is just a really beautiful book about colours in an Islamic setting.
Date Jar
It still needs to be filled up…
Last Ramadaan The Munchkin was really into dates so I hope think this will go down really well. Every night we break our fast with dates and it’s a great way to start your mornings too. So every day he gets a date from his jar and gets to change the number on it too as a countdown to Eid.
Good Deeds Jar
We should be striving to do good and be good humans everyday and as a Muslim and a Hufflepuff, this is really important to me. The idea is that every morning he pulls a good deed out of the jar to accomplish for the day. Simple things like, greet everyone with a smile or play with someone you usually don’t or take your teacher some flowers. Because he’s 3 I’ve also put in some treats for the fun of it all. So there are 20 good deeds and 10 little treats. Nothing big, things that he’d get anyway like little cars or a small chocolate.
Sadaqah Money Box
During Ramadaan we also do a lot more charity. We should be doing it all the time but Ramadaan gives us the time to really focus on it. That’s why one of his good deeds is sorting through his toys and picking ones he doesn’t play with anymore to give to children who don’t have any.
The Sadaqah money box he can fill up with coins he finds lying around and then give it to the masjid at the end of the month or whenever it’s full.
Colouring Book
I found a whole bunch of Islamic printables online and had them bound into a colouring book for him. There are some activities about the phases of the moon also because he is obsessed with the moon and we can explain the concept of a lunar month.
Dua for Breaking Fast
The Munchkin is really good at learning his duas, with repetition and constant use he recites them so beautifully. So I’ve printed this one off for him.
Mymona
May 26, 2017 at 2:25 pmReally love these ideas Zayaan. and if you don’t mind im going to use them (or some of them). I think we sometimes forget to include them in a lot that we do thinking “agh they still small” or “I need to get done” and forget that this is how we learned.
when introducing the reward system with AM, I saw that he loved to complete certain tasks if it meant getting a stick,
Munira
May 26, 2017 at 3:30 pmThis is absolutely adorable!
I love that this Ramadan Box makes the fundamentals of Islam the focus of it while being fun and exciting for little kids and teaches them too!
Fatima
May 27, 2017 at 5:50 amThis is lovely! My kids are almost 5yrs and 2.5yrs. Last year we did the Quranic word a day calendar from Parenthood Muslimstyle and this year we made toilet paper roll binoculars to look for the moon and a good deed calendar from http://www.modestmunchies.com 🙂 We’re also listening to lots of Ramadan nasheeds to create atmosphere (I created a youtube playlist to make it easy) and I told them we could take out bunting to decorate, lol.
There are two other things I’d like to do; 1) I want to try to set aside a daily special reading time for Islamic kids books, my kids love stories and we don’t spend enough time reading aloud and there are great kids books on seerah and other things; and 2) my kids love watching kids recite Quran and Ramadaan is the month of Quran so I plan on setting aside some time every day to YouTube some kid recitations (there’s this show called “Hafiz Indonesia” which is kind of like Idols for Quran!)
A friend of mine hosted a “Quran party to welcome Ramadaan” for her boys last weekend and it was awesome, she did foods from the Quran (including cake pops decorated like whales,elephants and bees) a treasure hunt for the animals from Nuh (a.s.)’s ark, pass the parcel and musical statues with Ramadaan nasheeds, story time with stories from the Quran, face painting (the options being animals from the Quran – elephant/spider/lion/moth-butterfly) and then she gave out Ramadaan calendars with stickers and printed arabic flashcards as party favours. The kids all loved it and she said it was so much fun to plan plus the bonus was that she was doing ibadat the whole time 🙂
Zayaan Schroeder
May 27, 2017 at 9:55 amThat all sounds amazing!! Definitely want to do more of these kinds of things for my kids as they get older.
Melissa Javan
May 27, 2017 at 8:37 amThis is amazing