Ramadan Morning Meeting
Taking from what we’ve done in homeschool outside of Ramadan, we had a Ramadan Morning Meeting yesterday.
In traditional schooling, teachers use morning meetings for a variety of reasons, one of which is to set the tone for the day, practice certain skills, such as language and math, and basically start the day off on a good foot.
Our mornings have ranged from sluggish to chaotic so far this Ramadan. We try to follow our daily routine of grooming and getting ourselves ready for the day, but it seemed to fall apart after that. So as we’ve sometimes done in the past, even for Ramadan, we brought back the Ramadan Morning Meeting.
The big idea: Write a small routine to be carried out each morning of Ramadan to review Islamic concepts (related to Ramadan), basic Islamic skills, and share with the family, each person’s Ramadan experiences.
How to Establish a Ramadan Morning Meeting
- Before carrying out a morning meeting, establish a place to hold it and rules (must sit in a particular place, must pay attention, must not interrupt, must be nice to each other, etc). Go over the rules with kids. In addition, establish a regular time (give or take a few minutes) for the meeting to occur.
- Also, work out a draft routine BEFORE you sit down with the kids. You may have to tweak it, so try to be flexible, but it’s a time waster not to have yourself together before you start (and an attention span waster as well).
- Keep the morning meetings short and sweet (don’t drag them out).
- After a few times, you can see what worked and what didn’t. At this point adjust your routine.
- Try to remain consistent throughout each day of Ramadan by doing the morning meeting daily.
What are some things to include in a Ramadan Morning Meeting?
Here is an example Ramadan morning meeting:
- GREETING– Start off with giving salaam and have children return salaams (do this with every child so you can make sure they are pronouncing it correctly). Sometimes have the children initiate the salaam.
- DATE: Go over the ISLAMIC date (Today is Ramadan ______, 14_____). You may want to make/use an Islamic Calendar display for this. Have children figure out the number of days remaining in the month (e.g. 2 or 3; 4 or 5—as it depends upon the sighting of the moon). Have younger children count up to the day (e.g. on Ramadan21, they count from 1 to 21). This can be the time when you take off chains from the Ramadan Paper Chain or anything you use to count down the days of Ramadan. Also take this opportunity to learn/review the Islamic days of the week. (Today is, tomorrow is, yesterday was)
- TIME: Have students figure out the time between now and breaking the fast; how many hours of the day they fast.
- SHARING – Have each family member tell how their fasting is going (hard, easy, problems, a good deed they have done) (Mention that we don’t go around telling our deeds to show off, but that we are only doing it now to remind us to do good deeds)
- ANNOUNCEMENTS/SCHEDULE: Go over the daily schedule, make any announcements (such as we are going to host a dinner, etc)
- Add any other component that you feel would be great to review or address in this period
- You could also give students copywork/handwriting work at this time to gently ease into the day. Give older students an ayah or Hadith to ponder and write about in a daily journal. Younger students could get a vocabulary word to copy (Ramadan, Fasting, etc)
If Abu is at work during the day, you can also have a Ramadan Family Meeting in the evening to fill him in on the day’s events/what was learned, read Quraan, etc. For other family time ideas, see TJ Ramadan’s “During Ramadan Family Time”