Today's lesson was Maulid al-Nabi, or Mohammed's birthday. This involved a little discussion about the origins of religions -- defined as attempts to answer questions about the nature and origin of the world, humanity's place within the universe, the nature of life and death, the rules of morality, the presence or absence of meaning, etc. -- followed by the story of Mohammed's life, from his childhood as an orphan through the revelation from the angel Gabriel to the years in Medina and finally the return to Mecca and the plans for the conquest of Arabia and surrounding lands. We then talked briefly about the spread of Islam with a map to show majority-Muslim countries, and I made sure to mention that while the US is majority-Christian, there are an awful lot of Muslims here. Finally, we discussed the five pillars of Islam and daily prayer rituals.
We tried to be careful with that, so we didn't have the kids actually mimic a rakat. That would be disrespectful, since they would be doing it without the faith that should go into it. Instead, we loosely demonstrated some of the motions for the cleansing and the prayer, and then separately described some of the words, while the kids were sitting down and listening.
Then we decorated 'prayer mats' as an activity. Joanna mentioned the tradition that all rugs are supposed to be woven with a deliberate error somewhere in the pattern, because only God is perfect and can create without flaws. The kids liked that idea.
It was a long lesson, and then we ran even longer than usual because it turned out that our classroom clock was 25 minutes slow. Oops. *sheepish*