Formal Sand Writing

We took yesterday off after a long and busy weekend, Masha' Allah. You may remember from our last post, last week, I introduced the Professors to writing in sand, but it was more of an introduction to the concept for them, and an observation session for me. Today we got back to it, and started formal writing practice. I did not photograph the lesson today, because I wanted to really work with them on correctly forming and centering the letters. I will do an update post every so often, insha' Allah.

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Getting Started

Same set up as last session. Again, the teaching pan is the oblong one, the two other pans are for the Professors not working directly with me.

Today I put significantly less sand in the teaching pan, so that when the letters were written, the bottom of the tray would show through, making the letter forms more visible.

In our classroom we have 3 sets of Alphabet posters. English Manuscript, Cursive and Arabic 

The English Alphabet posters came from the Dollar Store, and the Arabic poster came from a local Muslim grocery store. All the posters show the correct way to formally write each letter.

We used these as our guide point. I had each Professor come up to the Manuscript Alphabet poster and point out the arrows, and which way they were going. They each traced the letter once or twice on the poster without my asking them to, Masha' Allah. Once I felt they understood the concept, we went back to the sand paper letter, traced it correctly three times, then wrote it in the sand three times. We only did capital A, B, C today, and I plan to leave it that way for this week. Next week I will add in lower case a, b, c.  We will take three sets of letters a week, insha' Allah.