"Glory to Allah" Bird Feeder Craft - 30 Day Craft Challenge

"Glory to Allah" Bird Feeder Craft 
Being Kind to Animals

Salam and congrats on making it to Day 5 of our crafting challenge! Today's craft is sure to spark excitement in your children's eyes. As always, we will be keeping the craft super easy and using items that can be found around your home. In addition to the craft, you will have the opportunity to teach your children how important it is to show kindness to all creatures of Allah (swt), including animals. I was lucky enough to have a book as a reference to further enhance this lesson. We read the book called, "Being Kind to Animals", by my cousin, the talented, Samira Zaidi Rizvi. If you wish to purchase this book, click here. 

We were able to extend our lesson by adorning our bird feeders with the phrases, SubhanAllah, Alhumdulillah, and Allahu Akbar, in Arabic and English text. We talked about how the animals are constantly praising Allah (swt) in their own way. One way of us praising our Lord, is appreciating His beautiful creations, such as the birds with their lovely chirping, and flowers with their vibrant colours and enchanting scents. 

You are free to paint, decorate and create your bird feeder as you wish - the most important part of this activity was the lesson it carries. We found this activity to be short and sweet - took about 30-45 minutes. If you do this activity, please send me a picture through DM on Instagram @WishfulWaufa. 

Materials

• Empty juice/milk carton or small sized cardboard box
• Wooden skewer/wooden spool or plastic straw
• Paint or construction paper to cover the carton/box
• Printouts of the words, SubhanAllah, Alhumdulillah, Allahu Akbar (download)
• Bird seed mix (we made our own with sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, peanuts and raisins)
• Sharpie
• Scissors
• Tape 
• Glue
• Yarn or string to hang the feeder
• Optional: colouring utensils or stickers to decorate

Steps:

1. Use Sharpie to draw the shape you desire for the opening of the bird feeder (see picture) on two ends of the box/carton
2. Cut them out with scissors
3. Using your scissors, make a small poke in the box below the shape you just cut out, and slide the wooden skewer through to the other side
4. Now it's time to decorate your bird feeder. We covered it in construction paper by taping. However, this isn't ideal for all types of weather. You can also paint it and it would withstand more harsh weather. It was rainy today, so I brought our bird feeder inside for the night. 
5. Once the box is covered, you can glue on the phrases of praise. We put Allahu Akbar on one, SubhanAllah and Alhamdulillah on the other. 
6. In order to decorate the bird feeder, we used glitter adhesive paper to put borders around our phrases of praise. 
7. Through the opening on top, we carefully poured in our bird feed mix.
8. Now it's time to use string or yarn to allow our bird feeders to hang. Poke holes through the top part of the box, insert string through those holes on both ends of the box, similar to what we did with the wooden skewers. Tie a knot so that you are able to hang the feeder. 
9. Go ahead and hang the feeder outside! 

These are most of the supplies for today, also need glue!

This is the shape we wanted for the opening

Use scissors to cut it out

Paint or cover the box in paper, be sure not to cover the opening!

Poke a hole with scissors and slide the wooden skewer through

Glue the words of praise on to the box

Decorate as you please

Notice the book in the back!

Carefully pour in the bird seed. We added about 1/2 cup of it.

Poke holes at the top for the string and slide the string through on each side

Hang outside!

We chose to hang ours on a tree

It started to rain so we brought it inside. Will hang it again tomorrow! Hopefully we can get a picture of a bird too!

Thank you so much for joining us again today. I hope you are enjoying the activities so far. Please leave some feedback below. Also, don't forget to subscribe by changing your view to Web Version. See you again tomorrow!