Spelling Bee and Snow

Alhamdulilleh we have started printing and giving our students their National Spelling Bee lists of 400 words +, and they are poring over it to find strange and unusual words! We expect students to take these with them wherever they go, to practice for the March Bee. Students will particiapte along with other schools in the Ottawa Bee and insha Allah continue to the national competition!

We recently had many duas in our circle about useful, fun snowfall and Allah answered them! Our snowpile at the back of the parking lot is where we are spending a lot of our time, building a snow city of apartments. We are delighted that the cold weather is not a deterrent to any of them!

We had a recent visit from Imam Fode from Vancouver who delivered a beautiful lesson on the 7 Characteristics, a lesson he derived from the personal characteristics from what Allah mentions in the Quran that He loves. We will continue to study this list: quiz your child about how many they remember!

As we wind down to the winter break, which we take along with the rest of the schools in Ontario, we hope our students will keep busy with their spelling bee and other projects. We will give them many things to work on while they take their break at home insha Allah, as learning never stops!

NaNoWriMo is underway!

As an author, teacher and mother it is SO exciting for me to watch our students writing with so much focus and joy as they work on their NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers Month) novels and stories! Our younger students have come up with some fantastic, adorable story ideas, and we intend on completing each one and publishing them in one form or another insha Allah! Please afford some time for your children to keep working on their novels at home, this month-long challenge needs all the work it can get!

Also this month we have more writing: the Polar Express Short Story Writing and Poetry contests are both for cash prizes! The Polar Express Poetry is (November 30) and Short Story (November 23). We are working on these as well, for those who can pull themselves away from their novels!

Coming up next week and in 3 weeks are Caribou contests again! Math is next week, and our first Coding challenge is at the beginning of December.

Visiting the website, you can see there are contests all year, so students have a lot of time to show their math skills. Parents, now that your child has the ultimate bundle, you can use the website for lessons and practice. Here are the next dates for the Caribou contests:

Math: 20 & 21 November 2024

Coding: 4 & 5 December 2024

Calcrostics: 14 & 15 March 2025

Last but not least, our experience at the Kids Market for Palestine on November 10 was a great success for all our students. A huge turnout meant a lineup around the building! We learned many lessons for next time, and look forward to offering more of our crafts and treats soon.

We are making sure to bring more core skills into our study at FHC, with Arabic writing, English writing and Mathematics. We hope to have students begin their portfolios so you can have a week-by-week update from them about their progress.

Opportunities Galore!

Today as I write this, students are prepping their materials, clothing and artifacts to share at KMA’s Islamic Heritage Fall Market.  We’ve secured a table at which we are building a museum exhibit and…wait for it…ESCAPE room for the community!

We visited a local museum/escape room at the Deifenbunker for research, and we have tons of ideas to share! We’re excited at the dawah opportunities, and to again be integrated into our community outside of school. See you at the KMA parking lot between 11am-5 pm, today Sundah October 20!

Alhamdulilleh, Allah gave us a second chance to perform the Caribou Math competition, so we wait this week to discover our results! Many more students worldwide participate, so it should be exciting to see how our students fared!

But that’s not the end! Visiting the website, you can see there are contests all year, so students have a lot of time to show their math skills. Parents, now that your child has the ultimate bundle, you can use the website for lessons and practice. Here are the next dates for the Caribou contests:

Math: 20 & 21 November 2024

Coding: 4 & 5 December 2024

Calcrostics: 14 & 15 March 2025

Coming up fast is the Kids Market for Palestine on November 10! We will spend more time helping the children with their business development, making sure their signs are engaging, their products are in production, and their expectations in du’a are locked in!

The Polar Express Poetry (November 30) and Short Story (November 23) contests are also coming up next month, so we will helping our students work out topics and frameworks for their writing pieces. Of course, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is November, too, and we are excited to enter each of our students in this engaging contest. We are sure each of them has at least one fantastic story in them!

As we are made aware of them, we will be starting work on other contests and learning opportunities, and will always keep you posted, insha Allah!

We had a special zoom call on Thursday with Miss Rebecca, a curator at Ottawa’s main museums, and she explained to us some details of how to curate a collection. We have arranged to set up a mini-exhibit about Islamic History Month at the KMA’s Islamic Heritage Fall Market on Sunday, October 20. Students will collect artifacts of all kinds to share their connection to Islamic history in their family. She also invited us to come to the Ingenium center for more lessons, and to visit the Science & Tech Museum this coming week. We’ll post to Whatsapp about the details regarding that special field trip.

The Kids Market emails have gone out from Sister Amna, the organizer, so we remind parents to please pay the fees (and also purchase the optional fundraising tshirts) to secure their children’s spots at the market.  If your child requires electricity, chairs to sit on, or prefers a certain position in the Hall of Peace, please also let Amna know via email. We are continuing to discuss and coach students on next steps to ensure they are all ready to raise money in their great business ideas!

Each Tuesday, we have a test day for our Quran, so parents are advised to help their child review their Quran study of their new surahs or ayaat. While we study Quran every morning first thing, it must continue on weekends, too. They have sticky notes in their musaahif so you should know where they are studying insha Allah. We also got them to do simple math to figure out how many pages they need to review to make sure they are going over the pages they learned previously. We counted all our pages, then divided them by 7 to get the amount of maraaji’ah pages to review each day of the week.

Now the order of the new musaahif are here and most of the students have theirs. Parents are advised to email Coach Hafsa payment as soon as they can for the large or small musaahif we will use to study. 

Islamic History Month Curation

Our grade 7, Ayah, conquered the world by getting first place everywhere masha Allah in the Calcrostics competition. Now all of us are prepping for another caribou math contest this week. Parents are advised that their children now have the ultimate bundle, and their passwords and must practice over the weekend. Tuesday Caribou Math’s website will be locked because the contest will begin in some parts of the world. We will do our contest on Wednesday or Thursday. Log your child into the website and then visit the practice tests page  so that your child can perform any and all practice tests (NOT the calcrostic ones, just the math) over this weekend. This is a contest which tests different basic math skills and some simple coding.  Of most importance is to practice the game ‘Turtle Walk’, as this is confirmed to be on the contest this year.  

We had a special zoom call on Thursday with Miss Rebecca, a curator at Ottawa’s main museums, and she explained to us some details of how to curate a collection. We have arranged to set up a mini-exhibit about Islamic History Month at the KMA’s Islamic Heritage Fall Market on Sunday, October 20. Students will collect artifacts of all kinds to share their connection to Islamic history in their family. She also invited us to come to the Ingenium center for more lessons, and to visit the Science & Tech Museum this coming week. We’ll post to Whatsapp about the details regarding that special field trip.

The Kids Market emails have gone out from Sister Amna, the organizer, so we remind parents to please pay the fees (and also purchase the optional fundraising tshirts) to secure their children’s spots at the market.  If your child requires electricity, chairs to sit on, or prefers a certain position in the Hall of Peace, please also let Amna know via email. We are continuing to discuss and coach students on next steps to ensure they are all ready to raise money in their great business ideas!

Each Tuesday, we have a test day for our Quran, so parents are advised to help their child review their Quran study of their new surahs or ayaat. While we study Quran every morning first thing, it must continue on weekends, too. They have sticky notes in their musaahif so you should know where they are studying insha Allah. We also got them to do simple math to figure out how many pages they need to review to make sure they are going over the pages they learned previously. We counted all our pages, then divided them by 7 to get the amount of maraaji’ah pages to review each day of the week.

Now the order of the new musaahif are here and most of the students have theirs. Parents are advised to email Coach Hafsa payment as soon as they can for the large or small musaahif we will use to study. 

Our First Contest (Again)

When students took part in the challenge of a math contest last week, a technical glitch caused their data to be lost! So this week, our students learned an important lesson about Allah’s Qadr. This gave us time to practice again, practice more, and actually get better results on the redo! Good job to all students for trying again with more energy!

Students will probably report that the main thing that happened this week was helping install and play on the new 12-foot trampoline in the SMA yard.  Alhamdulilleh the play park is nearly complete. We hope to have students help us design a larger structure so older children can swing and climb soon.

We got a special visit from Amna, the organizer of the Kids Market for Palestine: all of FHC students got in! Each student that had prepared a business presented it to her and she offered several really helpful tips and advice, Alhamdulilleh.

We wrapped up our week with an outing on Jumu’ah to Maverick’s just down the street, and Willy’s Pizza. We made important connections with our manners and our custodianship, and ate while we had our first Book Club before offering Jumu’ah with the community.. 

We continue next week implementing Amna’s tips and ideas for our businesses and writing our poems and stories for the Polar Express contest!

Our First Contest!

Students took part in the challenge of a math contest this week, and developed presentations on the Sunnah to attend a local gathering of remembrance!

1. Calcrostics Competition: What’s more challenging than a math contest? A TIMED math contest! We are so happy that all our students gave it their best effort, and wait to see the standings to see which of us placed high in the international ratings! 
2. Living the Love of the Prophet ﷺ poem, reflection and nashid presentation: our students wrote and prepared wonderful reflections in various forms about their love of the Sunnah and our beloved Prophet.  They will attend and present during this event at the KMA. 

We continue next week with our ongoing business development for the upcoming Kids Market for Palestine, and the Polar Express short story and poem contest!

Our First Projects!

We have gone straight into projects in our second week of homeschool!

Our daily schedule allots time for projects in our afternoons, and we began work towards 3 this week.

1. Kids Market: Students brainstormed and chose business ideas to book tables at the Kids Market for Palestine, which will take place November 10 2024. We are coaching them in entrepreneurship, marketing, and value propositions. We visited a local business on Friday (Green Leaf) and took note of all the great ways the shop engages customers!
2. Calcrostics Competition: In this coming week, all students will compete in a Calcrostics contest! We’ve been practicing these fun puzzles in preparation for the contest.
3. Polar Express Short Story and Poem Contest: Students have generated ideas for writing poems and short stories for cash prizes!

We hope all parents remember to register their children for the Kids Market as the due date is Sunday, September 22. See the Kids Market section below for more details.

We’ve chosen this upcoming Kids Market to teach about business, social enterprise and halal earning. Your children will be working on business ideas while making the intention for donating for Palestine. Applications are due September 22, so parents must register each child here. 

We have been working on business plans and will continue to develop them in the coming weeks inshaAllah.

Your children will be entering a contest to test their math skills on September 22, 2024!  The Caribou (Calcrostic) Contest challenges students of all levels to solve timed math puzzles!  We encourage parents to visit the site and guide their children to practice: 

https://www.cariboutests.com/test/practice_test_login.php

Week One Done!

Alhamdulilleh, we completed our first week of homeschool! Students got to know us, and we learned a lot about each other.

This week we started off with visiting the Bill Mason Center, and exploring the forest.  We took note of all kinds of animals, plants and fungi, and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over an open fire for lunch.

We started to explore Stittsville and tried out 3 different play parks and fields, swinging on the swings and playing football.

We couldn’t wait to check out the local library and so we took our students there to look at books, arrange for their own library cards and walk back to have lunch outside.

The week finished off with our first trip to the musallah with Jumuah prayers with our community. What better way to end each week than to blend into Jumuah prayer and benefit from the reminders of Allah!

Starting next week, we hope to begin our online math lessons with Khan Academy, and to practice more with the Calcrostics math puzzles. All students must come to the homeschool with their own mushaf, a device and an excellent niyyah!

Parents, please double-check your supply lists (for JK-2 and for Gr 3-Gr 8) as some students were missing essentials like their own mushaf, and a curiosity journal.

First Day of Homeschool!!

Our first day of homeschool at FHC was great!

Parents and students enjoyed a POTLUCK BREAKFAST at 8:30 am, followed by our first field trip! 

We visited the Bill Mason Centre. We explored, experienced, appreciated and learned about mushrooms, tree species, manners of the forest and the beauty of Allah’s creation in this beautiful natural setting. 

Our Open House was a Success!

Community members, parents and littles enjoyed a fun evening of meeting the teachers, playing games and eating CAKE!