Friday, May 29, 2009

A short presentation on Islam

April 2009. Scarsdale Middle School, 8th grade classrooms. Collaborating teacher: Emma Wixted.

Students in Emma's classes reflected on what they knew about Islam before I started the lessons. Again, there were many interesting discoveries during this phase, where there was a consistent pattern from the students to think of Islam as a region or country. Some even had no idea about what it was. And most made the connection with the Middle East. They were surprised to know that the majority of Muslims, more than 80%, do not live in the Middle East. 

We went through some basic information about Islam, such as the the five pillars in Islam, the six articles of faith, mosques, prophets in Islam, etc. They were surprised to find out that in the articles of belief, Muslims believe in prophets similar to the ones in other big religions. Names such as Abraham, Moses, David, Jacob, Job, Elijah, Noah, Jesus, are the names of the prophets in Islam. We finished by watching a clip of Queen Rania, the Queen of Jordan, from her YouTube page. Queen Rania has been one of the world leaders who have tried to bridge the misperceptions and misunderstandings about Islam, the Muslim and Arab world. 

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