The Ash-Shams Sun Catcher - 30 Day Craft Challenge

The ash-Shams Sun Catcher - 30 Day Craft Challenge

Salam everyone! Today I'll be posting our Day 11 craft. Our focus was on Surat ash-Shams (Arabic: الشمس‎, "The Sun") - Surah number 91 in the Holy Quran. We listened to its recitation and and discussed a little bit of its meaning. We focused on how to pronounce the word ash-Shams in Arabic as it appears in the Quran. We talked about how important the Sun is for the survival of life on Earth. We thanked Allah (swt) for giving us the Sun and the boys expressed how much they love sunny days. After this discussion we started our daily craft. 

Today we made Sun-catchers, that are meant to stick onto windows to give off beautiful multi-coloured light all day long. This craft required a lot of patience because we were pasting small pieces of streamers onto a surface so it took a little more time than the kids are used to spending on daily crafts. There is a shorter more express version of this craft - if you scroll all the way to the bottom you can see it!

For this blog post I am going to post my pictures and steps together so that I can clarify what exactly we did for this craft. Enjoy!

Materials:

• Streamers or wrapping tissue in different colours cut into small squares/rectangles
• Scissors
• School glue
• Clear Tape
• One Large sized Ziplock bag
• Yellow coloured construction paper
• Clear Tape
• Paintbrush 
• Sharpie/Permanent marker

Steps:

1. Use your scissors to cut your Ziplock bag into two separate clear sheets 
2. Use your sharpie to draw a large circle on the surface of one sheet of the Ziplock bag
   
3. Dilute your school glue with water - half water and half school glue - we will call this paste 
   
4. Take your paintbrush and start spreading the paste onto the sheet (within the circle you just drew) 
   
5. Now take your tissue or streamers and start pasting them onto the surface in a mosaic style 

   

   Here you can see us using wax paper but we re-did the activity with the Ziplock and it worked much better!

6. Be sure to cover the entire surface and feel free to overlap the tissue as you work along
   
7. Once you've covered the entire circle, set it aside and allow 2-3 hours for your mosaic to dry. 
8. In the mean time cut out a sun shape with your yellow coloured construction paper
   
   
   

   

   Fold your sun in half and cut another circle through the middle

9. Once your mosaic is dry, you can peel it off easily from the Ziplock. It still peels off from the wax paper but its not as easy to do so. 
   
10. It will look like a nice bright mosaic
    
11. Trim the edges of the mosaic to make it into a neat circle
    
12. Use your clear tape to stick the mosaic onto the sun

    

    Be sure to flip your mosaic over so the front will be framed by the sun

    
    
13. This is optional but you can cut a second sun and glue it to the back of your craft - this gives it some added neatness
    
14. We pasted the second cut out to the back of our craft so it can be appreciated from the outside of our window and the inside! 
15. I wrote the word الشمس‎ for Hadi in pencil as well as "The Sun" on the front of our craft and he traced over it in black marker 
    
    
    

    

    Tracing Fun!

16. We used our clear tape to stick the craft to our windows
    
    
    
17. We had some left over mosaic so we cut out some free hand suns and taped them as well - this is a great option if you didn't want to do the yellow construction paper part - and just want an easier/faster activity!

    

    These have a beautiful look to them as well!

    

    These are our "ash-Shams" Sun Catchers!

    
    

This is what I have for today! Keep following and InshaAllah I will see you tomorrow!