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A Means for Educational Communication with Children
Opening of the Short Stories website
Opening of the Short Stories website
Peace be upon you and the mercy of Allah.
Dear brothers, communication between parents and children is of utmost importance. Communicate with your children, laugh with them, play with them, run a competition with them, talk to them. This helps to deepen the relationship with the children and they will have beautiful memories with you.
Many parents do not know how to communicate with their children. He tells you, for example, "I have allocated half an hour or an hour to communicate with my children, but I sit with them and do not know what to do." Some say, "I tell my children not to hold electronics too much, enough tablets, enough mobile phones, enough computers." Okay, what do we do, Dad? They do not know what to do.
Therefore, dear ones, there are some simple and nice ideas that I wanted to share with you today. If Allah wills, I will share with you one idea to improve communication with our children. This idea I have tried myself and found it very useful and enjoyable, and it is based on short stories, not long stories or complete serialized stories in parts. This is one story and another story and an important topic, but now we are talking about a simpler and easier project to apply to every father and mother if Allah wills.
We made this project on a website and named this website "Story on a Card." Its slogan is: "Communicate with your children, stimulate their memory, plant unforgettable values." So these are the goals: to improve communication with children, to improve their memory and strengthen their memory, and also to plant in them educational values that are not forgotten by the permission of Allah the Almighty.
The website is available, of course, on mobile phones and computers. Its address is easy: qesas.net (qesas dot net). Of course, www.qesas.net.
How do you use the website? You enter and find a collection of stories that I have made for my children, very short and very simple stories. For example, a story can be illustrated like this story titled "I Forgot to Pay" (meaning I forgot to pay, but to simplify the language for the children: I forgot to pay).
You read the story completely. If you like it, what do you do? Below the story, you will find a download button. You press the download button and it will give you the story in two forms: it will give you a Word or PDF copy (meaning we uploaded it in PDF). It will give you the story in this form, a connected story that you read to your children twice. This is a tip, you can read it twice, once, three times, depending on their recall and memory.
Then the children sit around you all: "Come on, Dad, I will read this story to you twice, then I will give you the same story but with blanks instead of some words, and you have to fill them in, and we will record the marks and the names of the winners." That is, a cheerful competition atmosphere.
So this story is complete, and then you will find in the file (PDF file) the same story but with blanks instead of some words. For example, here: "The family woke up at five o'clock." Here the children return the papers to you. So again you read the story to them twice, for example, you distribute the pieces of paper to them, because we make the story and then immediately a copy with blanks, and the next paper, for example, two copies with blanks. You cut the papers, you divide them in half, and you distribute them to the children according to their number. Then they fill in these blanks and return the papers to you.
For example, this is a real copy from one of my children (of course, I did not put the name, my children feel shy if I mention their names in this context). But for example, one of the children had excellent performance in the quiz or in this exam, this competition. We correct, we put marks on the correct answers. Sometimes you can put half a mark, for example, a big spelling mistake, or a word very close instead of singular plural, or instead of dual plural, etc. You can put half a mark, but there must be fairness among the children in the correction.
Then you record the mark, you count the number of correct answers and you record the mark. Then you make a table on the computer or manually. The table records the names of the children (of course, this is also a hypothetical table, not about my children, I made a special table for my children and I do not want to show their marks so they do not feel shy either). But you record the names of the children, for example, let's assume Omar, Sarah, Ahmed. The first competition on the first day, for example, let's assume Omar got eight, Sarah got six, Ahmed got six. The second competition was longer and had more blanks, you record their marks.
Then at the end after the fourteenth day (you can choose after a week, you can choose after a month, the main thing is the principle), meaning you gather the total marks and you determine which child was in the first place, who was in the second place, who was in the third place, etc. The winner over the two weeks, for example, is given a prize. What is the prize? The prize could be that you take him to a sweets shop to eat a piece of cake with him, for example. The prize could be taking him to a stationery shop, a toy shop, to give him a simple symbolic gift. And the children really love these competitions and are affected by them and their competitive spirit is ignited.
Of course, dear ones, the important question: how do I consider the differences in abilities among children? I may have children, for example, in my case I have 14, 10, 10, 8. How can you consider the differences in age? You can multiply by a percentage, for example, you say the older son's answer will be multiplied by 0.7 out of 10 to reduce his mark compared to the younger children. You can add the age difference, you have a child who is ten years old and a child who is six years old, you say the mark that the six-year-old child gets, I will add four marks to it, which is the age difference between them.
You can vary the topics between narrative and informative. The younger children's memory is strong in narrative stories: he went and brought and bought and sold to the end. The older children have good memory in informative stories: the country is characterized by such and such, the industry, the type of cars. To explore their varying abilities. This son has a distinctive memory in informative stories, this one has a distinctive memory in narrative stories, etc., meaning.
And we will also talk later, if Allah wills, about other competitions that I have also tried with my children. You can give each child and try to see the distinguished side in him so that he gets a high mark in this test in this aspect, without deceiving them and without misleading them that they are superior when they are not superior as some fathers do, because this is a mistake. The father or the son in the future will be shocked by a wall that he was deceived that he has high abilities and he does not have these high abilities in the specified field. But vary the types of competitions so that in the end the child actually proves his ability and his talent in a certain field. So, by the permission of Allah the Almighty, we will talk later about other types of competitions.
So, is our website qesas.net a one-person project? Meaning, am I the only one providing the stories that I tell to my children? No. By the way, these are few and short stories. Again, this is not the main story project we previously discussed, and it is very important in education that you tell your children a story before bed and series, meaning a story over ten or twelve sessions, for example. No, here we are talking about short, simple paragraphs containing an educational idea and a certain value. If you can, it is not necessary for every story to contain an educational idea. The important thing is to communicate in good words.
So, back to the question: Do you think you, my brothers and sisters, can contribute to this website? Of course. You can help us and spread goodness among people, by the permission of Allah the Almighty. And how can you, as a father or a mother or as a brother or a sister, contribute with a story? You enter the website, click on the three lines. These three lines will show you options, one of which is "Contribute with a Story" or "Share a story of your own creation." You will see here the required story standards, meaning to direct the effort, we have set some standards. We have ten or eleven standards, I will mention the most important ones now.
What are the conditions of the story that you can share?
So, if you have a story that meets the conditions, what do you do? You write your honorable name, the email address if you wish, the subject. The body of the message (of course, the body of the message may mean that the goal of my story is such, and you may not write anything in the body of the message). The important thing is to upload the story file. Upload the story file in Word format so that if there are simple notes on it, we can edit it. Then upload a picture of the story if you wish. If you have a suitable picture for the story, you can upload a picture with the story. Then "Send" and send the story.
There are some brothers and sisters who will, by the permission of Allah the Almighty, review these stories, ensure that the conditions are met, and then publish them to the public in your honorable name or in your honorable name. Meaning, every brother or sister preserves the right that this story is from their authorship.
For example, my brothers, this story "I Forgot to Pay" can be reviewed. The story can start today after we finish this video. You read this story, it takes you no more than a minute to read, and Allah knows best, one minute and a half. But you notice the availability of these elements in it: it has few words, it has certain educational values, and it has a plot and suspense in some aspects.
I would like to thank my brother, the pioneer in education and its technologies, my brother Tawfiq Saad al-Din, who I asked him and said to him: "Tawfiq, if you don't mind, please create a simple page for me where I can add my files and we can receive files from people if they wish." May Allah reward him with goodness, he caught the idea and created this complete website that you see. So, we ask Allah the Exalted to accept from me and from him and from all of you, and we invite you to enter and browse the website, now it has simple stories.
And we invite you to participate. Now, my brother and sister, you can check a message on your mobile and sometimes spend long hours, unfortunately (although spending long hours on mobiles is not something I like), but you spend a long time reading a story, a note, a joke, and so on. From now on, you can see a story or a certain situation that happened with a lesson, think about how to turn it into a story to contribute with it to your children and the children of the Muslims, send it to us in this way.
May Allah the Exalted accept from all of us and may He rectify our children for us and gather us with them in the Gardens of Eden. Peace be upon you and the mercy of Allah.