This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.
This week, we are spotlighting Khalil Raki, our Arabic teacher. Mr. Raki (who is also my husband – hence the name coincidence) teaches Arabic to all of the students, from Pre-K through 4th grade. At ISM, we have a mixture of native Arabic speakers and non-native Arabic speakers, as well as a few varieties in the middle!
One of the things that our Arabic students are learning is how to connect letters to make words. In Arabic, each letter has 3 possible ways that it can look, depending on where it is placed in the letter. Here is an example, using the letter “bah”, which makes the same sound as B would in English.
As a way to help the students work on recognizing these letters and reading words – Mr. Raki pulled out the legos! He used masking tape to add the correct possibilities to the legos and the students use the legos to make words. Then, they sort out whether the words they’ve made make sense, or if they are non-sensical.
Mr. Raki’s favorite part is that with just a few turns of the legos, he can turn a non-sense word into a true Arabic word and keep on building vocabulary. (Just for clarification, but of these pictures show real Arabic words. 
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Come back next Friday to find out what the other ISM teachers are up to.
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