A Companion Guide for A Little Farsi Coloring Book: Farsi Alphabet (اَلِفبایِ فارسی – álefbãyeh farsee) Writing Activities for Kids of All Ages

… model a learning mindset, and create positive associations with books, our cultural backgrounds, and heritage languages.

On each page of A Little Farsi Coloring Book, you’ll find the isolated form of a letter with a tracing guide, embedded in a picture of the sample word to help remember its shape. For example, the letter álef | آ for the word āb | آب | water, is paired with a wave picture shaped like the accent mark on top of the letter. To practice tracing, follow the numbers . Start with 1, putting your pencil down on the dot. trace the dashes to the end of the line, then lift your pencil and put it down on 2. Continue until all numbers are done.

How can we take our Farsi learning further with this coloring book?

For our youngest learners:

• Read the name of the letter out loud while the child is coloring, and repeat the sound it makes and the example word. For example, you can repeat a few times throughout the coloring time: “This letter is called álef (tracing the letter with your finger). It makes the sound ā, like in āb (pointing to the image of water).”
• Take their hand and help them trace the letter with just their finger.
• Demonstrate tracing the letter with a pencil, and then offer to hold their hand while they trace over the top with their own pencil.
• Give them pom-poms (or beads, beans, etc) and help them line up the objects on the lines. Even though it sounds strange, it helps them get used to the shape of the letter and connect it to the sound you make and the object in the picture. Bonus fine motor skills practice, too!

For older learners (and grown ups helping kids!):

• After tracing the isolated form with the dotted line guide, challenge yourself and your kids to trace the other forms and the entire example word at the bottom of the page.
• Make designs all over the white parts of the page using only the various forms of that letter. For example, you could make a border of آs around the image of āb | water. Bonus points if you incorporate images of the example word into the design! For letters that connect, you can make beautiful continuous lines of the letter connecting to itself, like ببب or ححح. Repeated exposure to the form will help writing the letter flow more easily, and recognizing its shape second-nature.
• With each new example word, name each letter in the word and practice writing it around the image as you say the letters and the word out loud. Hearing/speaking and writing at the same time helps cement the connection of sound to letter.
• If your Farsi is advanced enough to do so, practice simple sentences using the word out loud while coloring the image. For example:
  • “آ مِسل آب. آب میخای؟ بَلِه لُتفَن. مِرسی” | “álef mesl āb. āb mikhai? báleh lotfán. merci!” | “álef like āb. would you like some water? yes please. thank you!”