By Zeynab Asadi / 22 Jan 2013 

My sister gave birth to her second child this year and can only help her first daughter in doing her homework.

Because of this, I voluntary help them and spend some hours at the weekends. She studies in the first grade of elementary school.

We make handworks for the science course. I teach her with simple tools that she can make interesting things to her and her classmates with no special facilities. She also takes credits by taking the handworks with her to school.

We make animals, trees or ships with fruits, depending on the lesson, together. For example once, we made an owl with apple, carrot, orange leaf and a few toothpicks, and a cactus tree in desert with cucumber, toothpicks and 3 potatoes. I give her the main idea by reading kids books, but we make the main material together.

And sometimes we go to park at the weekends together and pick up leaves and wooden fruits of trees like buttonwood and then stick them on a yellow pasteboard so that she can bring it to her school to show it to her teacher and classmates on the days she has science classes. By making handworks, she has learned to look more carefully to her environment, think about it and explore the world around and at the same time it is a hobby and a brain teaser game for her.

She recently gives me ideas to make new handworks with fruits. If there isn't enough material, she herself suggests substitutes for it. Sometimes I ask her how to make handworks to involve her mind with it. She learns to reinforce her creative abilities by this.

 She takes every newly made handwork in her hands many times and looks at it carefully. When I'm leaving their home, she convoys me to the door eagerly, kisses me and says: "Thanks for helping me to make handworks".

Her joy is enjoyable for me. I feel that I have contributed a little to her intellectual growth. When I have not enough time to play with her, I feel that I myself am losing something. Her curiosities and the questions she asks are informative to me too.

Her subtlety of spirit and her sometimes funny questions and sometimes questions that belong to someone older than her age, makes me happy and teaches me a lot.

The moments we spend together are great and happy memories for both of us. She repeatedly remembers that memories and by reminding them, she wants to make me understand that she likes to make handworks together again. She shows her handworks proudly and gives the ones she loves more to her teacher as a gift.

Recently I noticed a Hadith from The Great Prophet Mohammad (peace and blessings be upon him) that is surprising and at the same time sweet to me: "There is a house in Heaven called "The Heaven House" that no one can enter but the one who had made a child happy." This Hadith encourages me to spend more time for her, not only because of the hereafter reward, but because playing with children is so important to Allah that He considered this much of reward for it.