وَأَقُولُوا فِي القُرْآنِ مَا جَاءَتْ بِهِ اَيَاتُوهُ فَهُوَ الْكَارِيمُ الْمُنْزَالُهُ وَأَقُولُوا قَالَ اللَّهُ جَلَّ جَلَالُهُ وَالْمُصْطَافَ الْهَاديِ وَلَا أَتْ أَوْوَالُهُ الحمد لله رب اللعالمين والصلاة والسلام على عبد الله ورسوله نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته always we begin with the praise of Allah and say we ask Allah and say we take salt to mention and grant peace to our Messenger Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم ورحمة الله وصيره وقام بشهر الله وعلى أباك We are speaking about homeschooling and this is the second part of my advice to the parents as it relates to homeschooling and we had spoken about the importance in the previous episode of flexibility and embracing the fact that you can do different things so you don't have to follow necessarily a particular pattern and you don't even necessarily have to follow what another homeschooling parent or home educator does because they teach their children a three subject a day or five subject a day doesn't mean you have to teach yours five subjects a day you can do what is right for your child and that's one of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that you can actually do what's right for your child and what works for them and what works for you و one of the biggest arguments you hear all the time is that while I'm working or I'm busy and I don't think I can manage it and that's true, some people are busy and it's difficult for them but actually sometimes if you looked at the way that you could just change the timings around and the way that different parents could perhaps share the responsibility it's kind of like you would see that it is possible to use that flexibility that is within homeschooling to benefit the child in a better way and to take advantage of the advantages that are there now we come to talk about the issue of qualifications because this is another major issue people have as it relates to homeschooling first of all we should say that you need to establish the legality of homeschooling where you are because it's not illegal in every place in some places it's not allowed in some places it is but again in this I don't recommend that you just follow what people say but you explore and you go into whether there are alternatives and I think that there is an ayah that comes to mind in this regard and I really feel it's really important to share and that is the statement of Allah in Surah An-N'aam ayah number 116 وإنهم إلا يخرصون if you follow most of the people on the earth they will misguide you away from the path of Allah they only follow guesses and they simply are using up wasting their time here Allah عز وجل tells us the danger of following people blindly and I believe this is so important as it relates to all aspects of education of your children and particularly homeschooling because for a lot of parents what happens is you listen to people that say it can't be done and then you say okay it can't be done for example or you follow an exact copy of what someone that you know who is a home educator what they're doing for their child but ultimately just following people without really researching and understanding it it's going to take you away from the path of Allah and it's going to take your children away from the path of Allah as it relates to their education and I think it's really important that you really look into the issue yourself look into alternatives and keep on searching until you find the one that works for you in some areas it's not allowed for your child to be outside of the education system in other places it is allowed but they can't get a qualification until they enter that education system so it might be the case that what you decide to do is to home educate your child for a period of time and then in the minimum amount that is required they have to go to the school it may be that it is allowed but it has disadvantages to it for example the education the qualification is not recognized by the country because they were homeschooled this is the case for some people and if this is the case where you are what you could look at is is it possible for my child to sit their exams abroad or via one of the countries that has a more open sort of outlook towards home education and indeed many of the western countries whose qualifications are so highly valued by people in the worldly life have very open policies when it comes to home education so these are all things to research and it's not really the purpose of this episode to talk about those but it's just interesting to show how you can broaden your horizon you know you're told it can't be done you can't do it so then you look as a parent you can't just accept that and say it can't be done okay then I'm not going to do it instead you have to look and say okay what are the obstacles well the obstacle is that the certificate isn't recognized okay what are the options for me studying or me encouraging my child to sit their exams it doesn't even have to be necessarily abroad since many of these countries offer places where you can sit exams in the same country that you're in for example now someone may turn around and say well isn't there a danger in that because aren't we going back to the same curricula that we said before that they're full of problems and you know that they can encourage the child towards atheism and so on the same curriculum that we were telling people to avoid before now here is where I think that you can really get the advantages of homeschooling because ultimately you're not going to reinvent the wheel and we're not going to say for you to completely formulate your own curriculum but what we would suggest the easiest way to do is to choose the best curriculum for your child in terms of the existing curricula that exist and those could be from a Muslim country they could also be from a non-Muslim country it might be because that's the exam you want the child to take in the end for example I want my child to take exams according to the British examination standard and therefore I'm going to teach them according to the British curriculum for example but doing that doesn't mean you have to accept all of the falsehood and the evil that that contains instead you as a homeschool parent as a home educator you can take that material and filter it first of all a lot of the stuff that is really bad in it is optional anyway it's not even part of the core curriculum so a lot of the stuff that we hear about these countries teach and that go on in their schools are not even part of the core curriculum they're not even part of the things that are critical to the child passing the exam or that are related to the examinations at all and even when they are so I'll give you an example of both issues around relationship education and stuff like that it's not part of the core curriculum generally speaking so you don't need to teach it to your child so all that stuff you read about them teaching in schools to children about relationships you can cross it all off because not a single part of it comes into the exam or not a single part of it any relation to the examined topics so that's an example of that but what about something like Darwinian evolution which is part of the core biology syllabus in most of the western curricula and indeed probably most of the curricula around the world that Darwinian evolution is there so here is where what you can do is how we talk about integrating Islam is when you come to the topic of Darwinian evolution teach your child the Islamic concepts and teach them the falsehood and the how it's incorrect the theory that was put forward by Charles Darwin and those who put it before him and after him and why it's wrong and what you do here is you can teach your child that when it comes to the exam write it in the way that you don't it's not necessarily what you believe so if they say that did human beings evolve from apes the child can simply write for the exam that according to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution human beings evolved from apes and according to him and according to us but we know for sure that it didn't happen because Allah SWT told us and the Prophet SAW told us so we don't need Charles Darwin and we don't need his thoughts about the issue but in terms of passing the exam they can just write the the exam like that that according to him or according to what we have learned in the syllabus or according to the textbooks or according to what many scientists think today and so on and they just write it for the sake of passing the exam but they have the ability to respond to it because you've given them the Islamic tools they know why it's wrong and the parents say well I can't do that I don't have the ability to to do that kind of to do that kind of thing how do I even you know approach that but that's why we said that it's not necessary that you as the parent everything why can't we even involve an external tutor for example why can't we even involve Islamic teachers or their YouTube content for example or we could arrange we could say to the local Islamic teacher for example that we have a group of homeschool children and they have some issues they would like to raise about their the content they've studied in their courses and could you address that for these are all things that can be done Insha'Allah and they're not Insha'Allah difficult to arrange when a person has the him when they have the high aspirations and they have the motivation to be able to do it so as we said when you take this curriculum and I would suggest that the easiest way is and it's not the only way the easiest way is to take the curriculum that you want your child to sit the exam in in the end and to remove from that curriculum anything un Islamic which is not part of the examination just remove it from the curriculum completely as for what is part of the curriculum and is un Islamic and you need it for the exam teach your children why it's wrong teach them the Islamic understanding and give them the evidences for it and really give your time and attention to teach them that so that insha'Allah when they come to the exam they're aware you know that this such a thing exists when you go to school the same thing if your child goes to a regular school exactly the same thing they're going to come to a point in biology except in regular school it's probably going to be more because all of that non core content which is un Islamic which you can't get rid of which the school teaches you have to do the same thing go to the child and erase those شبهات from their mind get rid of them explain to them the Islamic answers if you don't know to do that that's fine nobody's requiring necessarily said فالغدوك فاية generally the answers to all these details and the response to the شبهات this is a collective obligation but find the right person that can educate your child about that and help them to be able to do that insha'Allah to give them some you know support to be able to get over those issues and understand the right Islamic the right Islamic understanding and the right Islamic teachings as it relates to them so you take that curriculum get rid of all the stuff which is not part of what is needed for the examination and here also you can be really really flexible as it relates to your child in terms of the extra subjects you want to add on you want to add on Arabic in there why not maybe they could even take that Arabic as an exam formally because even though you're teaching them Arabic for the purpose of the Quran and so on it's a beautiful thing but on top of that in addition to that as well you also have an advantage that you may be able to even send your child to take a regular exam on that topic like a regular state-based exam on that topic and they could get a qualification from it as well which is one more qualification so you can add in there when it comes to things like history just because the syllabus stops at the history of Britain from 1066 until 1945 doesn't mean that you have to stop there doesn't mean that you can't have extra lessons talking about Islamic history and bringing in your Islamic content in there it doesn't mean that you even have to teach that in the first place if you think it's not that valuable so you can choose the things that work for your child so one of the things you can as parents which you can do when it comes to this and in relation to the ayah we mentioned in سورة العنعام if you follow most of the people on the earth they will take you away from the path of Allah and when it comes to parents you have to also when you think about your child's future prospects and a lot of people also bring this up when it comes to homeschooling when you think about your child's future prospects also realise that the world of work is changing and before for example some parents might say without a degree my child cannot possibly be successful they won't even be able to get a job a degree is a necessity they might say but we might say to them that might have been the case when you came into the world of work but that doesn't have to be the case now and in fact what we see now is we see that the whole world of work is changing the kind of jobs people have is changing the way people change careers is different the kind of jobs that are up and coming that have great potential in them are also different as well so not necessarily just picking the standard subjects that everybody goes with although I'm sure it's a core of you know usually people talk about English maths and science or whatever that's the sort of most important in terms of that but what you add on and what you give them in terms of extra information you've got to look at where you think the world of work will be Insha'Allah in 10 years time in 15 years time in 20 years time so you look forward and you see okay we see that for example these these kind of skills are very much and Insha'Allah we're going to encourage our children to do that and there's no reason why you can't do that and then you can either look to get a qualification in it or you can leave it without a qualification and maybe in the future they could get a professional qualification on that in that particular subject it's also important to broaden your horizons beyond just traditional subjects that are you know traditional education in that way but what we want to show is that what you need to do is to give your children the different experiences of all of those different things so you give them an experience of building things you give them an experience of the sort of theoretical study you give them the experience of the kind of arts and humanities in an Islamic way removing all of the non-Islamic stuff from that and you don't know where it is that your child will find that Allah makes it easy for them and Allah in that particular in that particular field so there's nothing wrong with giving your child and I think as a home educator you have the ability to give your children a far wider range of experiences doing many many different things many different things and giving them the chance to experience those different things and letting them you know see where they have the greatest ability and where they have the greatest inclination and motivation and in the Islamic education we've already spoken about putting a roadmap together for your child's Islamic education so likewise putting a roadmap together for your child's worldly education but doing that in such a way that you look at your circumstances you look at the qualifications you want you look at the jobs and the environment and where the trends are going and you try to give your child a wide range of experiences and you try to remove as much of the haram content as possible and where the haram content does remain you challenge it you explain it and you refute it so that's a you know that's kind of an overview if you like so let's get into some specifics now let's talk about how we actually handle this as parents because we're just one person two people how do we actually manage all of this information and all of this knowledge and as we said I just want you to again appreciate that there's nothing wrong with bringing in a tutor there's nothing wrong with sending your child to a particular class for a particular subject if you as a parent have determined that that's the most effective way and the best way in terms of fearing Allah as much as you can and also achieving what your what your goals are in terms of their Islamic achievement and what they need from the worldly life so at the end of the day we're just going to use that as a rough guide of where our child should be at each stage in the development and we're going to be quite happy to go off on a tangent and to delete things and get rid of things but we just going to use it as a a a a a a a a a a a a We're just going to use so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel . It may be that you choose a different country curriculum to the one that you are living in because they may have advantages . you may feel that it better supports the nature of your child and the style the way that your child learns it may be منهم بشكل يزاكون المتواجه من الحفاظ المال والدخار فجرباً ما يحبون السفاء من الغرب and are the people who would rather do that. فتقول أنهم يجبون MyChild to study through this route because of that. ولكن هذا هو نقال قوة. لذا كنت تجعل أن ترسل ذلك على прوسيه هكذا من أنتقلها منذ جهد when you actually manage that from an early age. يعتقد أنه يمكنك أن تفعل تحديات your children's studies into four phases prior to their main exams. Now when we say main exams countries differ but typically main exams are the exams that a child sits between 16 years and 18 years. In the UK that could be GCSEs and potentially A-Levels in other countries everyone has something different but most countries have some sort of standard exam which is mandatory or somewhat mandatory which takes place between 16 and 18 years old the high school exams or you know the exams prior to going to university or college. So talking about this I would typically divide your child's education into four phases you don't have to because remember it's all about flexibility if you want to divide it into 10 you can if you want to divide it into two you can but I'm just giving you some نصيحة that what worked for me is to divide it into four phases the first phase is the preschool phase the preschool phase and in this preschool phase I think you want to prioritize play and you want to prioritize learning both is fundamental islamic things like the islamic alphabet and so on as well as you know starting arabic at a very young age inshallah that would be a beautiful thing because that will just get them to grow up with the arabic language as opposed to being something they start learning at 10 or start learning at 15 or start learning at 25 like some of us did or start learning at you know 20 or whatever as some of us did but uh you know we want them to sort of be comfortable with it so I would say this one is not as difficult you can take انسبرation from what the non-muslims have written you know if you want to look at some of the non-muslim books that have been written about teaching your children at that age at the preschool age you can look into it but a lot of preschool is is a combination of two things it's a combination of learning through play having lots of different experiences and also preparing them for what they will need in the first year of school so it's a good idea to have your eye on the first year of school what the kind of things they would need but don't don't marginalize islam here bring in the arabic language bring in the alphabet the arabic alphabet reading it bring in you know don't when you have that flexibility you've got that beautiful time with your child where your child read doesn't have that huge pressure to conform to a particular standard you have a chance to actually bring islam in there should you send your child to an islamic nursery perhaps there might be some islamic nurseries that are excellent that do a great job of that every place is different every country is different so you look at what you have the options for and you make a decision about whether that's beneficial or not for you there in terms of the quran at that age I would advise that and I asked my teacher about this my quran teacher about this and he advised me um when we I used to learn with him in the master and never we the sheikh he advised me حفظ الله تعالى he said that you know really probably it's for most children it's around the age of five where they become a bit more serious about that you know committing to memorizing and learning the quran some are way before that because it depends on the age of the child and the ability but generally before that you should be definitely getting them to hear the quran a lot listen to the quran a lot سبحانه وتعالى نرسل what are most of the children learn music and nursery rhymes and dancing and all sorts of things like that what do we want them to learn quran nor listening to the quran hearing the quran positive excellent you know activities things that will benefit them in شاء الله a wide range of experiences and also to be proficient in the skills they will need when they go into the first year of school as well as the skills they will need in the first year of islamic school as well because what we at least what I'm doing right now is we have a dual curriculum one which is taken from the sort of the the western model as a guide of what the child should learn at each age and the other one which is a pure islamic roadmap and each one we're looking at okay in the first year what are they going to need and just giving them some preparation for that and getting them ready for it again no harm in benefiting from books ماتيريل's web sites things you can subscribe there are some great websites you can subscribe for just a few dollars or a few pounds every month and they give you ماتيريل's lesson plans examples and you can adapt them you know if you see there's some elements in there that are not islamic you can adapt them and in شاء الله وتعالى it's not so difficult there's a lot of things you can learn there and a lot of things you can experiment with and a lot of resources available for you to print out books you can buy and you know you can be flexible and learn around it like that the next phase that I want to talk about is the what I would call the primary school phase and that is the phase of where again again every every school every every school is different but we're looking at somewhere around to the age of 10 or 11 years old something like that and it depends every school is different it could be a little bit more a little bit less than that 10 years old 11 years old something like that where the schools change and sometimes even the course material changes so again in this early phase I personally found that there is so there are so there is so much material available online lesson plans you don't need a formal textbook unless you feel certain that it's needed in your country's learning system usually you don't need a formal textbook and you can do a lot of project-based learning with them and to be honest you can really you know you can go and get resources you can go to your local even the local bookshops and buy books that are for you know children to learn from English for ages three to seven English for ages you know six to seven five to six four to five all of these different revision books and play books and study books and things you can get there's plenty of ideas there's so many ideas online there are websites just dedicated to providing teaching resources and many teachers use them and many teachers in school even for their lesson plans use certain you know big websites that they download resources from and lesson plans from and worksheets from as a home educator you can do exactly the same add to that all of the resources from other home educators and honestly I don't think that the primary level is that is that difficult at that primary level what you're really looking at is to make sure your child is at least maintaining average as it relates to the standards that are expected and that's where the curriculum comes in it's not really about us following the way that they do things there or the way they do things in that country but just keeping an idea that my child is meeting the standards of an average child in school and I in شاء الله تعالى you'll find with homeschooling it's way better than that because one of the great benefits of homeschooling is you spend so much time with your child and your child gets one on one teaching or even if you've got three children one to three teaching or if you've got five children one to five teaching but that's way way better than one to 30 teaching or one to 25 teaching they would have in a typical in a typical school so there's no harm in you know in terms of when you you you benefit from that and your child actually ends up going ahead because even if you're giving them two hours a day and there's nothing to say you have to do two hours a day you can do one hour a day a half an hour a day five hours a day seven hours a day what you think but you want to just make sure that your child is meeting at least the average standard set out by the curriculum in that year so that if there is ever the case that you did have to put them into a school you know that they're matching the same standards that you have that are kind of taken by the whole country or that are kind of accepted by the whole country so that's not a bad idea to kind of measure them they might fall short sometimes that might happen in school they might be way ahead in other aspects as well but also that islamic education so how do we deal with the islamic education at the primary level here's where really we can start the roadmap because the children are old enough to start their hifth and to start the hifth of the quran and the hifth of حلي the hifth of متون and that's what we talked about in the islamic roadmap is to start with those children and really pushing them in that regard because again primary school is relatively relaxed as it relates to there are relatively few examinations usually there are there the pressure is relatively small at that kind of age the age of under 11 years old or 12 years old that kind of age is very minimal amount of pressure and expectation so if you can get them ahead in terms of homeschooling you can use the rest of that time for their islamic education their hifth and start them on the understanding the older they get we talked about that when we talked about a roadmap for your children's education in terms of islamic education the next phase is the phase where they are transitioning towards their more sort of their final examination it's not the actual final examination time there's a time before that so if we said that the final examination is at 16 so then from 14 to 16 would be the time when they're really completely focused on that final on that final examination however the time before that so you can adjust these according to the country you're in but let's just say that the final exam is at 16 years old and there are two years of of preparation there are two years where the exam content is taught and the child is expect it at the end of that to sit the exam so that covers 14 years old and 15 years old what do they do in that gap between 10 and 14 or 11 and 14 or 15 that gap where they are transitioning into the school the secondary school we would probably call it they're moving into the secondary school and in that time they're not really preparing for the exam as such i actually found that in a lot of a lot of curricula the great amount of material is repeated here so it's taught in a in a more simple way and then it's taught again for the exam later on and i think honesty what you can do here is you can take the textbooks that are typically taught in that year and you can you base your lessons around them or again you can you can get materials and lessons online various youtube resources also where people teach lessons for the kids but here you need to kind of start to think about their exams because one of the things that i think you can end up doing is you can end up with a lot of unnecessary repetition at that stage where they're learning something and then you know two years later they learn the exact same thing with one extra step and i understand the idea of a repetition for the purpose of learning that's an islamic concept you teach someone more than once so that they absorb the material but i think also it can be done in a way that's wasteful and i think when you actually get involved in in home education one of the things you'll see is how wasteful the curricula are from the the the different countries and the different standards that exist they waste years of your child's time with things that are just utterly unnecessary or repeated for the sake of just filling the time for the sake of filling the time and i'm sure that there are you know educators and people who wrote those things that have reasons for that but practically when you look at it you think that you know to be honest what says that my child can't understand that at that age if they can understand it and i understand that in school the reason this is done is because you have to go with the average child but if your child is doing better than that then there's no reason why you should restrict them there's no reason why you should restrict them and in this i would even advise taking exams early if they can because there's many situations whereas a home educator you can sit your child can sit their exams early or stagger their exams space their exams out over two or even three years instead of taking them all at one time because there's nothing to stop you doing that usually in many systems so here i would say don't waste time in this gap between 10 years old and 15 years old or 14 years old don't waste that time with things that are unnecessary get them into the material but according to you know the ability that they have they don't have to push it all the way like if there's a grade from let's say for example there's a grade from five to nine with nine being the best and five being kind of an average if they at the age of 11 or 12 years old are at the level where they've covered the material for a five then inshallah over time you can push them a little bit every time up you know push them up a bit further inshallah and ultimately you're going to have to look at your own child in that you're going to look at your own child you're going to look at where they are what they're managing what they're comfortable with if you have to delay their exams two years what's the harm in that if your child is struggling or your child is not really getting the idea or you want to give a little more time to the islamic stuff what's to say that you can't just delay those examinations two years or a year who said that you have to take them at exactly that year unless it's legally mandated which in some countries it is can't avoid that in some countries but in a vast majority of situations it's not legally binding for the child to take that exam on that particular day rather they could take it before they could take it after so now we move on to the last phase which is just before the exam the year before or the two years before the exam and here I believe that in this case you one of the best techniques it's not the only technique is instead of you going through textbooks go through exam papers because the textbooks you moved it if that makes sense you you moved the textbooks earlier so the stuff that they were doing the textbook for a 16 year old you may be covered it when they were 14 or 15 and that might sound really difficult but in homeschooling it's not because they they have way way more productivity than they would in school generally speaking so you've kind of moved the textbooks forward a little bit and you left that time at the end for practicing to fit the exam in other words given the child the skills they need to sit that exam and that's what all or many of the very top schools and the private schools do they train their kids specifically how to pass that exam so they teach them ways to do things quickly techniques for for doing well in the exam questions that come the most frequently and they give them lots and lots of practice past papers and things like that again all of these are available online usually if your child is registered an exam center even the exam center will be helpful and give you exam papers and things like that to do they're usually there are archives online there are even online services where you can pay and they can give you the exams in an electronic format and the child can take them and they somebody can mark them there are so many things that are available out there but I think you transition towards the exam and this is where we talk about that that flexibility as it relates to the when the child takes the exam for example you could you might find that the exam time is once a year twice a year or in some countries even three times a year that they can sit exams and you can stagger them so you could give them an exam at 14 years old in the subject they're doing best in an exam at 14 and a half years old in the next one an exam at 15 years old in the subject that they are two subjects they're doing well in at that point and so on or you could delay all the exams until they're 17 instead of 16 or you could you know you can do any combination of the two including the islamic exams and we want to encourage people as it relates to the islamic stuff and the islamic roadmap that also the person gives an attention to islamic to doing really well islamically and that could be like any jaza for example that a child gets any jaza for example in the quran any jaza in a certain book because this is our islamic tradition and it's not nice to give up our islamic traditions you know subhan Allah we have an islamic tradition that you study a book and you study it from a teacher and the teacher gives you any jaza a permission in this book that you have studied it from them and you've taken it from them and that becomes like a qualification to you and that's so so valuable if it's possible to get it for the child as well so integrating that into their whole environment what you'll find ishallah is that the islamic side supports the the the other side the the worldly sciences and even the worldly sciences to a certain extent some of the study skills could also support the study that you do in your islamic studies as well so the child you know develops in that way inshallah again this has been a very very brief discussion and to be honest i could probably do a whole series on this which would just be called home educating but it's not really the place for in terms of the muslim family i just wanted to touch upon and inspire people that it is possible it doesn't matter if you have to bring in a tutor and subhan Allah sometimes people talk about money and in reality you might find homeschooling is significantly cheaper than sending your child to school even in countries where where the education system is free subhan Allah the amount of money you save on not having to buy their school uniforms and textbooks and all this type of stuff or paying school fees or school transport or whatever it might be it might it's more than enough for for you to be able to pay for things like a tutor if they need some extra help in something and you're given that priority to the islamic education as well as giving them what they need in the worldly sciences so how you can see children and and we've seen examples homeschool children going on to top universities and i'm not saying university is is a great idea at all but the point is that their home education didn't stop them being accepted into top universities and getting jobs in very very which require a very high standard of education there's no reason why a homeschooled child should be any less than a child that has the best education in the best private school in the country and in fact you should be able to find that it's even easier to achieve that for your child in terms of home education along with the flexibility and along with having that relationship with your child and ultimately i think i'll finish with this point inshallah to Allah that one of the best things you can get out of home education is building that relationship with your child you know what they're studying they come to you you're able to you see when certain non islamic elements come in you can challenge those and also you feel like you really did the tarabia that was obligatory upon you you feel like i actually did my job i actually educated my child or gave them an education and there's no reason why you should involve other people in that teachers tutors islamic societies even schools because you might find in some countries you need to put your child in school for a year maybe your circumstances are such that you need to put your child in school for a year but i think if you do this right and you really think about it and you're creative and you seek the help of Allah عز وجل إحرس ألا ما ينفعك وستعم بلا ولا تعجس seek what will benefit you benefit your children and ask for the help of Allah and don't feel that you can't do it subhanAllah you'll see that your children will enjoy it more than they enjoy their regular school inshallah وتعالى and they will benefit from it in terms of their islam in a way that is inshallah immeasurable you know it can't even be put into words how much they can benefit from it inshallah and all of those harms that people say in that تخويف that scaring people that people do where they tell your child won't be able to talk to anyone your child will be introverted and they won't be able to work as part of a group and so on and all of this you'll you'll realize the reality of it inshallah when you get involved it does require lots of research i would certainly advise trialling it before you before you just take your child out of school like that test it on a weekend maybe one day a week on an evening have a go and definitely subscribe to homeschooling groups look online even even even here there is no harm in looking at the way that some of أهل الكتاب سرقشة their homeschooling even though i think that there's enough from the muslims that you probably don't need to do that but even for example christians have a long tradition of homeschooling in order to avoid the محرمات and subhanallah they barely have any محرمات and there's barely anything haram for them and still they homeschool their children to avoid what they consider to be from the محرمات subhanallah so there's also they have also resources and books and methods of how to teach explore different countries because i think when i started off i limited myself just to the country that i knew and i found that there were actually better systems in other countries so inshallah there's explore what's available get books read the end of the day it's not going to hurt you anything if anything it will benefit you and like i said don't feel that it's only that you have to homeschool your child full time there are so many other options halfway options that you can do so that you can at least say you know i feared الله as much as i could i did the best that i could with regard to my children that's all we have time for on the topic of homeschooling i'm going to be talking and that's actually brings us to a conclusion on the topic of tarbiyah in general and inshallah we're going to be talking about other rights of the child in the next episode inshallah because there's more than enough we've talked about education now for certain it didn't cover everything and there's a lot lot more to be said but it could just be something just to give people a bit of inspiration and others can inshallah take on that responsibility to to help people to be able to do that analyze where general was best السلام عليكم if you're enjoying these videos and you'd like to keep up today with all of the courses we're going to be running make sure you head over to amau at home.com


What's going on guys? I wanted to put up a brief announcement update because you know people haven't seen me in a while So the announcement is I am probably going to be going to Linux Fest over the summer I've actually been taking some time off this week Earlier this week.  So I got so much done this week. I have been pruning grapevines I need a I'm about to prune my fig tree over there fig trees a bunch of stuff So it's been a nice week off, but I'm going to Linux Fest southeast probably over the summer They have thought about canceling it because of all the virus and stuff, but I think they're they're thinking is that It'll probably blow over in the summer and it'll also probably be less severe and hot hot weather Either way If you are in the southeast of the United States, of course I recommend you to go to Linux Fest just you know, if you want to see me or anyone else Because I will probably be there. It was actually very nice going there two years ago I met I'm very happy to say in fact that when I went there my subscribers Who I met maybe a dozen or so I forget how many people in there were in the whole event But they were by far the normalist people there So which you might not think but it was true. In fact, they look like normal well-adjusted people So normal you wouldn't even think they use Linux crazy But I will be there again. I'm gonna be submitting two talks one of them are already submitted But one of them is gonna be on shell scripting and another one is gonna be on suckless software so That's what I'm gonna do. We'll see Anyway, so I've just been hanging out look at this actually look at this.  I'm happy. Maybe I'll have some pecans Actually, let's look at you know, I never did a video last summer about my fig trees Which I have not pruned this one yet for this year. Look at it. It's humongous. I will tell you I got Hundreds maybe thousands. Well, I don't know if thousands maybe a thousand figs from this thing They just I would come out here every morning and just eat as many figs as I could eat and just go back in and the next Day there'd be more of them. So I recommend getting a fig tree. It's easy.  I don't know All right, so anyway go to Linux Fest and I'm also I also contacted DistroTube yesterday Derek and I was like, hey, I know you live in the southeast you should come too I don't know. We'll see if he comes Trying to think who else live if there's anyone who lives in the North Carolina You know Carolina, Georgia area or something like that. It's pretty close So I will be going there. Although, you know, I'm sort of against driving cars in general I don't know if I've ever talked about that in a video. I do have a car Cheap car one of the cheapest cars, you know, you can buy But I just don't like driving long distances. There are many reasons for that But I think I actually will make the drive instead of taking a bus last two years ago I just took a bus took mega bus super cheap was like 20 bucks to go from Atlanta to Charlotte That's great when you don't have to drive the whole way You can just do whatever you want on your computer or something But it definitely way cheaper than a plane ticket, but all right, so just rambling at this point I will say that I have a lot in store soon As you may know, maybe I should talk about what I've been doing just to give you context I know a lot of people just see that I don't put videos up for like a period of a month or two and they're like Oh, we died he quit YouTube he blah blah blah So for the past year or so or not not really the whole past year But since I've moved here first off since I moved to the middle of nowhere I thought my life was gonna be quiet and simple and I wasn't gonna have anything to do all day And I could just do antifragile tinker tinkering all the time at my house and do whatever I want not actually the case I've actually been really busy not just with managing the stuff on my land But like doing you know, I live close to a bunch of family and I do family stuff go to church a lot You can do just do a bunch of stuff and I also got a full-time job since I moved down here I didn't expect to actually get a job.  I've been wage-cucking well not wage-cucking. I'm salary-cucking but still it takes up a lot of time But when my contract ends in a couple months, I'll probably be doing stuff more full-time So if you've been missing my daily videos I Hope to be doing that soon. I think I'm motivated to do that. In fact, I'll tell you I'm glad I took this job because Originally, I was just getting burnt out on doing YouTube videos and and stuff like that now I'm like, I feel more motivated just like it's it's not actually as bad.  I will say I have lost I have a brokerage account I have lost like a thousand bucks because of this coronavirus thing so annoying I mean, it's not real money since it's in the stock market, but you know, whatever But don't don't worry. I'm not I'm not close to dying or something. I'm but anyway, that's about it See you guys next time. Yeah, that's it


Searching for Bigfoot. The better humanity gets at sharing information about our world, the fewer miracles and magic beasts there are in it. Before the world was explored and nature scientifically documented, there could be anything out there. Dragons, giants, witches, sea serpents. Until smartphones became ubiquitous, people were still able to cling to some of the magic and mystery in the form of cryptozoology. Sure, there are no elves or goblins in the lands over the horizon, but maybe there's a giant ape walking upright in those woods by the mountain. Maybe there's a monster swimming in the depths of that lake. The prevalence of pocket cameras that can circulate video footage around the world spoiled all that fun, because people understood that if cryptids like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster were real, people would be getting them on video all over the place now. Instead, the prevalence of online video footage led to more mundane revelations. Police brutality is more common than previously believed. Palestinians are subjected to horrid abuses. People are more talented, creative, and hilarious than we had ever realized. But the magical beings are nowhere to be found, and we can retrospectively conclude that they probably never existed at all. People who claimed to have seen angels and witnessed amazing miracles performed by holy men throughout the ages were probably making it up.  The people who claimed to have encountered Sasquatch and Nessie were probably lying. And there's some dissonance with that in our society today. People hunger for magic and mystery, and they're desperately reaching around for it wherever they can in a rapidly shrinking world. Spirituality, psychedelics, UFOs, ghosts, the Mandela effect, the occult. Something in us intuits that there must be something more to this thing than we're seeing. We know there are no leprechauns or unicorns hiding in the shadows, but we sense that there must be something magical happening here that's evading our perception. It can't just be the dull humdrum of office drama and stress and horniness and Netflix and food and family that consumes our waking attention from day to day. But what if that's a mistake? What if that assumption is based on an erroneous premise? What if this experience right now is just as earth-shakingly novel and miraculous as if the heavens parted and you were lifted up into a cloud of angels right this moment as you read this? What if the only thing causing you to see this waking experience right now as any less breathtaking than a dragon's treasure trove is your mind's habituated response to it? I mean, what's yearned for in that sacred space within ourselves can't really be in the discovery of some hidden magic out there in the world, can it? Because even if we discovered it, that would quickly become the mundane norm. If extraterrestrials came down from space and began openly walking among us, it would be a really big deal at first, but for how long? After a while, they'd just be one more mundane thing happening in our world. Oh, that's Vipforp. He's an E.T. He's my manager at Costco and he's a bit of a prick sometimes. And then you'd be right back to yearning for some magical hidden novelty. Now imagine if you were seeing your own life for the very first time. Imagine you'd never experienced this world before, that you'd always been a disembodied consciousness with no world to experience and no sensory organs to experience it with, no neurons to think with or form memories with, and no nervous system to feel with. Then imagine, after eons of this, you were flashed into your current experience right now. It would be pretty mind-blowing, right? Seeing for the first time, hearing, touching, feeling, thinking. It would be experienced as appearing inside a giant universe made of miracles. Is it not possible then that whatever's happening in the world right now is not the issue at all, and that the real issue is our own perception? That this yearning we feel is summoning us not to seances and weird TikTok rabbit holes about otherworldly experiences, but toward a different way of perceiving? And is it not possible then that we could learn to see the world with fresh eyes all the time, to meet each moment like we've just been born into all this from a yawning infinity of emptiness? Is it not possible that this way of perceiving life has an endless barrage of brand new miracles is far more attainable than reaching around in the world hoping to brush up against angels and divinity? Is it not possible that the only thing causing us to miss out on this way of experiencing is a sequence of mental habits that can be willfully deprogrammed through conscious intention? Is it not possible that this right here is the miracle we are yearning for and that it always has been? That we're not really searching for Bigfoot but for a different kind of relationship with the ordinary? It's a possibility that might be worth exploring. Maybe that exploration is the real adventure we've been called to here.


Hello, I'm Jiayi. I am an artist and I also teach art. I like to make art a lot of different ways. Sometimes I dance, sometimes I work with technology and one material I really love working with is paper. So today we're going to be exploring some paper magic. Maybe you've seen one of these before, sometimes people call them cutie catchers or fortune tellers. But I think that today we're going to call it a story maker because it's a way of making a Choose Your Own Adventure story. These are done a couple of different ways with lots of different kinds of stories in them. But we can think about a way to make it that has different parts of a story. So the parts that I'm thinking of are like one really big part of a story is character. Another big part of a story is the setting or where the story takes place. And another big part of the story is what actually happens, what the plot is. So maybe we can have a part of it that shows who's the main character in the story, where does the story take place and what happens. When we are making our fortune teller or our story maker, we need a square piece of paper. But it's okay if you don't start with a square piece of paper. You can start with a rectangle.  I'm going to use some paper that is a little bit bigger than regular notebook paper. That way it's a little bit easier to see on camera. So I have a piece of paper that's like this. And so to make our square, what I'm going to do is fold this so that this side touches this side. So we have this going to our adjacent side. And when I'm making a fold like this, I like the fold to be pretty crisp usually. And so I'm going to use the backside of this colored pencil to make my fold a little bit crisper. If we cut right along here, then we'll have a perfect square. So I'm going to go ahead and fold this part up too, just so we know with our fold exactly where we want to cut. And it looks like this. So if you have scissors, you can go ahead and cut right along here. If you don't have scissors, that's also okay. What you can do is this crease. You can take it and you can fold it back and forth a couple of times. So the paper has a memory of where it needs to be cut. So I'm going to fold it again the other way and back once more. And you can carefully start right here and tear right along the crease that you made. And now I have two pieces of paper and one of them is a square. To make our fortune teller, what I do is I start by folding the paper in half, in half again the other way. I take each corner and fold it to the center. This is going right to the center like this. Again, trying to get those creases nice and tight. It's okay if your creases aren't perfect, but you want to make sure that your pieces of paper don't overlap and it's going to be a lot harder to lift up your flaps if the paper overlaps. Now that you've done this side, flip it over to the other side. And we do the same thing again where we're folding right to the center. And this is what I have. To make it in from this flat shape into the fortune teller shape, I usually just fold it back and forth a couple of times. And then what I want to do is sort of push in like this. And then you'll pull out the flaps. And then you have your fortune teller. You can lift up the flaps to see what's on the inside. On this one, I started to draw out what the different parts are. So what we can see here is that in our fortune teller, we have a part that I am calling the outside. The outside part is the part that we can see. So we have one, two, three, four sections on the outside. Then we have a part that I call the middle. So this is the part where you're going like this. And sometimes in the middle, sometimes people choose to do a small triangle or choose to do the big triangle. So on here, I labeled it 1A and 1B. And on the other side, it's 2A and 2B. And I labeled it this way where it goes 1, 3, 2, 4. Because I want to know that 1 is across from 2 and 3 is across from 4. So if it's this way, I can see 3 and 4. If it's this way, I can see 1 and 2. And then there's the last part. And that's the part that I call inside. So inside is where you have your last scene. So I have inside 1, inside 2, inside 3, and inside 4. So if I unfold this all the way, we'll see that on the edges, we have our 1, 2, 3, and 4. Our inside scenes are 1, 2, 3, and 4. And then we have our middle. And our middle is kind of split in a funky way where this is 2A and this is 2B. And these parts get squished together when you fold it like this. Now we can think about where we want to put the different parts and what we want to put inside of it. So I have this extra scrap of paper from when I made my paper into a, into a square. So on this paper, I'm going to start brainstorming some different ideas. So I think that on the outside, what I have right around here, in this one, I want it to be character. So that's who's the main character in the story. So I'm going to write outside. And then we can think of a bunch of different ideas for who this main character might be. I love working with animals, both real and imagined. So I'm going to write bird, alligator, fish, monster, ghost, starfish, dog, cat, human. So those are some options, right? Maybe one of them we're made to. On the middle part, the part that we have on the inside, we can think about the setting or where this might take place. So maybe we are on a boat in the ocean or maybe we are in the mountains or in a treehouse or maybe we're in a regular house or maybe we're in a forest or a volcano or underwater or in outer space, maybe on a space station. And then the next part you want to think about is what's the action that takes place? What's the plot? What happens in the story? So this is outside, middle, inside. So inside maybe we can have something like climbing into the sky, growing wings, getting launched into outer space, playing soccer, getting caught in the storm, becoming a ghost. So I have a bunch of different ideas, which is great because now I can use some of those ideas when I'm working on my story maker. So I'm going to put my ideas over here so that I can refer back to them. I have one that I already started and I have two characters on it but I haven't done any of the other parts. So I'm going to start here with character and when you are making your story maker you can use anything to color with if you want. You can use just a pencil, you can use markers, you can use colored pencils and one of my favorite things to work with are watercolors. So I already have a monster and a merperson and I think next I want to do another alligator kind of creature. So I know that when this is folded this way that this is the direction that these go and so because I know this I know that I need to make my character standing up this way. If I do it this way it's going to be upside down. It can be helpful to write a note on a piece of paper so you know which direction things go. That's part of the reason why I made this one. That way when I look at it I know which direction this is. So I wrote outside one and I know it's not going to be this way right because that's upside down. So for my next one I'm going to go ahead and start on my character and I am doing my alligator creature last character. So now I have all of my characters and I can start on the next part. So I could do my setting or I could do my plot or my action. I need this to dry out just a little bit so I'm going to work on my inside part first. And if I look at this handy guide then I'll know that my inside parts need to be facing this way. So for my inside part let's see what are some different parts that could happen some different actions. I think that I want one of them where the character is getting launched into outer space. So I'm going to make my rocket ship. Another thing that I think I want to happen is that there are clouds and there is like a ladder that falls down from the clouds. I'm thinking that there is going to be a big fire that happens.  Or maybe it's wind so maybe the fire is actually just getting bigger. Last panel I think I want to do one about playing soccer. So I'm going to draw a bug accidentally going over a fence there. So now I have my inside and I have my outside and I think I need to wait a minute for this to dry. I think that this is almost dry enough. We'll go for it. We might get a few splotches but that's okay. So on the inside of this one I think that this is where we're going to put our setting. So with this one I'm going to have one where it takes place in the forest. Another one that takes place in the ocean but on top of the water. Maybe there's a boat in the ocean. A good place to live. And then the next one we're going to have it be these are my four scenes. So on here we have our four characters. We have our monster and our merpersome and our alligator and our bird. So who do you want to choose to be your main character? You can choose that. And now tell me when to stop. Alright we're going to be in the forest and then in the forest what's happening is that there is a soccer ball that goes over the fence. I wonder what that story is about. Thank you so much for playing with me today. There are so many different options for making your own choose your own adventure story maker. I would love to see what you come up with. My name is Jiay and I am an artist and I love working with paper.