A really exciting and fun part of Muslim homeschooling is selecting resources to help you teach. How do you choose the right resources that actually help you reach your goals? There are so many beautiful and appealing textbooks, workbooks, unit studies and learning aids out there but how many of them are aligned with your family’s Islamic values and well-designed for you. This blog post explores the impact of well-designed resources on your Muslim homeschool so you can be intentional about picking out the right resources for you.
Well-designed resources make you excited to teach and learn
It’s exciting beginning the new school year partly because you have new books to open and use. Well-designed resources make teaching easy and engage you and your kids in the subject matter. They help you teach what is important to you and you feel your lesson time was spent productively and beneficially.
Well-designed resources build positive momentum
Have you ever had a day when it felt like you got loads done? Normally it began well and you kept going from there. Well-designed resources help you meet your learning objectives and that feeling of achievement builds positive momentum that can affect the rest of your day. For example, if you use a reading comprehension that was based on a biography of a sahaba, you can tick English and Seerah from your list before 10 am. Suddenly you are excited to move on and get even more things done.
They save you time
You don’t have to edit them, skip parts or supplement the resources. Instead, they cover everything you need them to and don’t add any inappropriate content. This saves you so much time. Open-and-go resources are such a help to homeschoolers. If they are well-designed they often are intuitive, they don’t require a complicated teacher’s manual. They might contain helpful instructions or pictures showing how to create the lap book or craft. This saves you time trying to work out exactly what you need to be doing.
Well-designed resources reduce stress
A resource that needs continual modification or complicated instructions to follow can become a constant source of annoyance. By contrast, well-designed resources make everything easy and reduce your workload. They are enjoyable to use and you really feel that a lot of learning is taking place. Your time is spent actually teaching and learning rather than prepping and making sense of the activities.
They serve your needs
Most homeschool parents can recollect a resource (or five) that they purchased because it looked great only to discover that it didn’t really suit their needs. The craft project for the kid who prefers lego to paper and glue, the project that required lots of reading for a child that was still building fluency…most of us have been there. Well-designed resources meet your needs and help you to achieve all your learning objectives. For example, you can use a unit study for a range of ages. Perhaps you would like to teach the same topic to a few kids of different ages. It can be a challenge with traditional ‘school’ resources. However, a resource designed for homeschoolers with in-built differentiation and a variety of activities can make teaching different ages a breeze.
An example of this is the Arabian Peninsula Unit Study which has a ‘main lesson’ for all the kids to learn together and then different activities designed for younger or older students. They also include a variety of activity types so kids can choose something that really engages them and makes them excited to explore more. Or the biography packs in the 10 Promised Paradise Series, which contain 3 different levels of difficulty. The more advanced passages have an accompanying worksheet and the passage for younger kids is just one page with a fun self-correcting maze to check they have understood.
I hope you have found this post about the impact of well-designed resources on your Muslim homeschool helpful. Get a resource designed specifically for Muslim homeschooling families for FREE! Join the mailing list here to download a biography pack about one of the Noble Companions promised paradise, Abu Ubaidah bin Jarrah (may Allah be pleased with him). Plus, gain access to the free resource library.
