kindness

Teaching Toddlers : Kindness and Making Friends

For playgroup in Week 3, we focussed on the theme Kindness & Making Friends. 

Our playgroup ranges from kids between 18 months to 2.5 year olds. Around this age, children start to notice other kids and are curious to learn and interact together. So this week, since we had the kids meeting regularly now for 3 weeks, we focused on learning names. Here are the lessons for Week 1 and Week 2 which I posted previously on this blog. We have paused our playgroup for now due to coronavirus measures in Istanbul, so I’m sharing what we did before we closed to inspire and help Moms of little kids with ideas for teaching islamic concepts since I know there isn’t alot available online focussed on under 3 years olds and I had to make it up as I went along 🙂

We always begin our playgroup with Salaam song( Omar Hannah) and “Nabil & Noura say salaam” each week to build consistency.
Related to the topic this week of Kindness & Making Friends, we chose these concepts:
Song & Play: “I have a new friend” (throw a ball or pass an object to the friend and sing the song with that friends name) It’s super cute to see the little kids interact with each other! We also sang this song from Teaching Mamas:


Activity : Puppet Show – I did a small puppet show about a giraffe and a penguin (the hand puppets I had at home!) where the Penguin wants to play but the Giraffe says he needs to tidy up first. So the penguin helps him to tidy up (kindness) so they can play together. 





Tips for puppet shows:
– Keep the story very simple and short so kids can follow and stay till the end
– Don’t lecture in the show, rather weave the moral into the story so they learn through the fun 
– Use different voices for characters 
– Make it funny and silly – this is how they will remember!
We also did some fun colouring – a picture of friends.

This weeks snack was Pizza Muffins. I posted the recipe here – its  super simple and makes an ideal outdoor food snack.

Let us know if you try the activities with your little one and how you get on!
Taskeen
Productive Muslim Mom