Assalamu alaikum everyone! First of all, Jazakallah khayrun to Salaam Mummy for having me on her blog. I am Fatima from MyZuban.com, where my goal is to help parents on their journey teaching their children Arabic and Urdu. Today, I’ll be writing about how you can help support your child to learn the Arabic alphabet, including lots of hands-on activities you’ll both enjoy engaging in together.

Once upon a time, the only way people like me could learn how to read Arabic was through dreary, boring repetition from a black and white Qaida. Hours were spent doing drills, repeating after my mosque teacher, my little five-year-old brain zoning in and out, engaging and then disengaging from the monotonous repetition. I’m sure many of you may be able to relate.

I say this often… the younger generation of today are so very lucky that there are a plethora of child-centric, fun and engaging Arabic educational materials and tools now available to parents and teachers. There’s such a variety of free resources available online, and many products on the market too to make the journey of learning Arabic enjoyable for children.

Here are some fun, hands on ways to help your child learn the Arabic letters. The best part is your child won’t even feel like they are doing ‘work’ – it will all feel like fun and games to them! I’ve also tried to keep these ideas light on the pocket, so you don’t need to feel like making your child’s learning fun needs to cost you a small fortune (because really, it doesn’t!)

Please note, some of these activities promote memorisation of the Arabic alphabets as well as pre-writing skills. Even if you don’t intend to teach your child how to write Arabic, including these activities in your child’s learning is good as it helps diversify your teaching methods, keeping boredom at bay. Writing the letters will also help solidify the memory of the alphabet in your child’s mind, something called muscle memory, which you may have heard of.

So without further ado…

11 Fun Ways to Teach The Arabic Alphabet

1. Flashcards – Arranging the Arabic letters in order

When we first got into the groove of learning Arabic, this was the first activity we started with and it is to date still one of my daughter’s favourites.

It simply requires a set of Arabic flashcards (we love these!) and a master copy with all the alphabets from alif to yaa. The activity is quite simply to just arrange the flashcards in order. Initially, your child will rely heavily on the master copy to help them, but soon they will begin to need less and less support, eventually being able to order the flashcards with no assistance at all!

2. Flashcards to play Snap

Snap using Arabic letters flashcards are also a fun, engaging game to play with the kids. Do bear in mind, this one will require you to have two sets of flashcards though.

Once your child has learnt the isolated Arabic letters and is moving onto learning the joint forms, I find the Iqra Games flashcards are great for this game. This is because they come in a huge set with 4 forms (isolated + 3 joint forms) per letter, and more cards makes for a more fun game of snap!

3. Memory games with flashcards

Can you tell we LOVE our Arabic letter flashcards around here? 😉 another way to switch up the fun with flashcards is to play this classic memory game which involves turning all the flashcards faced down and then turning them around two at a time to find two of the same cards. It’s a memory game, but it also aids in recognition of the actual letter, particularly if you also name the letters on the cards – e.g., ‘Here, I found the two Qaaf cards!’, or ‘Uh oh, I needed a Jeem but I got a Khaa!’

4. Art activities using Arabic letter sheets

There’s nothing quite like getting crafty with the kids to grab their attention and get their hands stuck into a task! You can draw some Arabic letters onto a piece of paper (or use my MyZuban free Arabic letter sheets to print them out) and use a variety of materials to decorate the letters. Some materials you could use include:

1. Colouring them in with pencils, markers, crayons, paint
2. Pompoms to stick on
3. Stickers – dot stickers are great!
4. Glitter! Messy yes, but a very engaging tactile activity

5. Play dough

Your child can use the letter outlines from my Arabic letter sheets as a guide to mould play dough into the shapes of the letters. This is a great activity to develop pre-writing skills too. You could actually even do this with clay and then bake the letters for a long-lasting creation which can be used for future educational activities too!

6. Tracing sheets

If your child is a fan of worksheet-based work like my daughter is, tracing sheets are a great, hands-on way to get them familiarised with letters. One bonus of this is it’s a great quiet-time activity – it needs minimal supervision and support from an adult. You can find free Arabic tracing sheets online through Google – sift through to the results to find worksheets which seem appropriate for your child’s age and ability.

7. Montessori-style sand trays

Sand trays are a very Montessori-esque method of introducing children to the alphabet. I used this activity with my daughter too (albeit for Urdu, although the Urdu and Arabic alphabet have a lot of overlap).

It’s a very simple and inexpensive activity – all you need is a tray or box filled with a small amount of sand – just enough for your child to be able to use their fingers to write into the sand. This activity is great because children are able to really get a feel for the letters, encouraging learning through tactile memory.

Though sand trays are primarily used to develop pre-writing skills, they will also help children memorise and recognise the Arabic letters too. These don’t have to be just with sand – you can make these with other granulated kitchen items you have to hand, such as salt, rice, lentils or flours.

8. Blocks

If you’re ambitious and up to a crafty challenge, you can attempt to make your own Arabic blocks using paint pens such as the ARTISTRO pens. If you already have wooden blocks at home, that’s great, otherwise getting plain wooden blocks is an inexpensive buy and you may even be able to source some cheap, second-hand ones from places such as Facebook market.

If wooden blocks aren’t really up your alley or just too much hassle for you, I’ve written a whole post about how you can use plastic megablocks too for this very purpose! Using megablocks is a lot less hassle – all you need are the blocks and a permanent marker!

We were pretty lucky one of our friends allowed us to borrow her Arabic blocks – my daughter absolutely adores playing with them, ordering them much like the flashcards from Idea #1 and she has also begun to try and arrange them to spell out names such as her own or her siblings. Here, we used her blocks in conjunction with the sand trays mentioned previously.

Understandably, not everyone can get hold of Arabic blocks. But they are a great tool for hands-on Arabic learning and one which are appropriate for both younger and older children. 

9. Puzzles

Another way to familiarise children with the Arabic letters are puzzles – there are a variety of Arabic puzzles available on the market ranging from inexpensive to moderately pricey, depending on quality, size etc. Here are a few Arabic puzzles on the market which I found to be reasonably priced:

• Eid Party Wooden Arabic Puzzle
• Salam Occasions Arabic Floor Puzzle
• Desi Doll Company Wooden Arabic Puzzle

If you don’t fancy purchasing a puzzle but do like the idea of having this activity in your teaching toolbox, you can make your own puzzle at home using this guide!

10. Magnets

Magnets can be used in a similar way to the flashcard idea in #1 – they can be used alongside a master-copy sheet to aid children in ordering them from Alif to Yaa, until they gain the competency to order them without aid. I’d like to have them on display on the fridge at all times, so children can help themselves to playing with them as and when they feel inclined to. What I really like about magnets when they are always available is that it curates the living space with Arabic, normalising the language and helping familiarise children with recognising Arabic letters.

11. Montessori Tracing Board

So this is the most pricey of my ideas in this list (that’s why it’s at the end, ha!) but I do really vouch for this method as being an excellent tool to teach children about the Arabic alphabet for a variety of reasons. Not only is it a very versatile tool and great for kinaesthetic learners, but it also helps with those oh-so-wonderful pre-writing skills. Currently, the most cost-effective Arabic tracing board I found for my fellow UK-based readers is here on Etsy. I hope this list of ideas has given you inspiration for activities to help support your child learning the Arabic alphabet! Do you have any other ideas you would have added to this list? If you do, please leave a comment below to help the community!

If you’ve found this post interesting and would like to see more Arabic learning-related content and resources, come join me at my blog MyZuban.com and Instagram @MyZuban! I regularly update my free language learning resources here and think if you are on an Arabic learning journey with your child, they will be very useful!