Time for Some Herbal Healing Bi'ithnillah

As you may know, I am a trained and qualified herbalist (amongst other things) but never intended to get rich off of my herbal healing and as such I never charged for my advice. The way I see it, knowledge should be free and ALLAH subhanahu wa ta'ala sent down all these wonderful cures for every ailment and blessed me with the know how, the least I can do is teach other to heal themselves with the permission of Allah.

As the weather gets colder I am starting to stock up on my herbal remedies which includes me having to make more tinctures, syrups, and just general herbal medicines. To help you help yourselves bi'ithnillah I will post up some simple remedies that you can make and have on hand for when common winter illnesses occur. More complicated illnesses or if you are on medication I do suggest speaking with a trained practitioner or herbal doctor as although plants are natural, they are potent and could interfere with current medication or aggravate some symptoms you suffer.

So look out for my next post which will be on how to make an antibacterial rub to help combat the colds or flu virus, as well as any other bacterial/viral illness.

Trying something else with Maths

As I previously stated, we use and love the Singapore maths curriculum. Unfortunately my daughter N has struggled with it somewhat. Now when I say struggled, that is a bit of a stretch. If N was in school it would be completely acceptable as she understand and completes all the work correctly. The problem is her memorisation of maths facts. With the Singapore curriculum, a lot of emphasis is put on memorising basic maths facts and getting an absolutely firm foundation in the basic building blocks of maths. A lot of which they skim over in the regular British curriculum and find that is is just enough for the child to understand, and to be able to work with. With the Singapore the children MUST MEMORISE and well as understand. The first few years are vital to making the child's later maths studies easier and building upon.

I must reiterate that if you put the sums in front of my daughter she could work it out usingt he methods taught to her, but her mental arithamtics is not as well as I had hoped it would be. But the great thing about home eductaion is that you can adapt things to suit yoru child, you can change thinsg up a bit to bring out the best in your child. which is of course what we really want. We want our children to be the best bversions of themselves they can be.

This is where the Japanese abacus comes in, also called a soroban. It is a wonderful tool used for centuries to calculate both small and large mathematical equations. Studies have also shown that learning to use an abacus greatly improves ones ability to do mental arithmatics of LARE sums. the kind you and I (in the 'west') would use a calculation for. Just what I need!

So I have just watched a few videos on using an abacus, ordered my first abacus/soroban off of Amazon and am excited to start (ordered it Monday and it came Tuesday. Woohoo!). As for me, I will update with how she is getting on once we get into the motion of it all. Excited :)

There is also the Chinese abacus aka the suanpan if you would like an alternative but for us, I think we will stick to the soroban-for now.

How about you, Have you or your children use the soroban? How do you find it?