My Cheek is Like A Rose

ABOUT THE BOOK
FAMILY ACTIVITIES

by Fadel Jamal Ali, illustrations by Shareef Waked

A collection of poems in classical Arabic that expresses the inner world of the child: views, dreams, interests and feelings.

Family Activities

Dear parents, A baby is exposed to poems from his/her first months. He listens to lullabies and to their musical rhythms. The baby stores these rhythms in his memory, and start using them at a later stage by saying words with the same rhythm, and still later becomes in poetry written in the ...

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Dear parents,

A baby is exposed to poems from his/her first months. He listens to lullabies and to their musical rhythms. The baby stores these rhythms in his memory, and start using them at a later stage by saying words with the same rhythm, and still later becomes in poetry written in the formal language. The main element for sparking a child’s interest in poetry is the words’ musical rhythm, and then understanding the difficult words with adult help.

"My Cheek is Like a Rose" is a poetry collection written for children in their language. The text gradually exposes us to the internal child's world: what he loves, what he hates, his fears and happiness, his worries and his dreams. Through this book, the child tries to help us to see things from the child's perspective, and not only from ours (the adults).

We share with you few thoughts on ways to enhance the reading of this book:

Family Activities

We can read the title "My Cheek is Like a Rose" and have a conversation about it: what is similar between the cheek and the rose? We can encourage children to think about different things which are similar to their cheeks, and cheeks of other family members.
We should read the poem slowly, in order to help him understand the words and to notice the rhythm, and we can have a conversation about the poem and its characteristics (the rhythm, short sentences).
We can draw two children, happy and sad children, and then to cut them and try to encourage the child to express himself regarding these two children by using verbs such as I love, I hate, I'm afraid, I ask.
Some sentences don't really express the child's feeling, such as the sentence "when my grandpa died". We can have a conversation about the child's feeling when someone dear dies.
The connection between the text and the illustrations is not always clear, sometimes it directly describes the text, but sometimes the drawings describe the text using metaphors. The illustrator adds colors to express positive or negative feelings according to the text. We can have a conversation with our child about the illustrations and what meanings do they contain.

المربّية العزيزة،

امتدادًا لكتاب "أنشودة الصّباح" وتذوّق طفل الرّوضة الأوّل للشّعر، رأينا من المناسب أن نقدّم كتاب "خدّي كالورد". الكتاب عبارة عن مجموعة من اللوحات الشّعريّة التي تصف عالم الطّفل الدّاخلي- الشّعوري- من أحلام وأمنيات ومخاوف ومسرّات.

نقترح عليك ألاّ تقرئي الكتاب للأطفال مرّة واحدة، وإنمّا قراءته على مراحل، ليتسنّى للأطفال فيهم النّص، وليتسنّى لك إعداد أنشطة مختلفة حوله.