On a chilly afternoon in western Loudoun County, a group of children used tweezers to extract rodent bones from a regurgitated owl pellet. A boy built a Lego launcher. A girl practiced her penmanship. On the wall, placards read, “I fast in Ramadan,” “I pay zakat” and “I will go on hajj.”<\/p>\n
Welcome to Priscilla Martinez’s home — and her children’s school, where Martinez is teacher, principal and guidance counselor, and where the credo “Allah created everything” is taught alongside math, grammar and science.<\/p>\n
Martinez and her six children, ages 2 to 12, are part of a growing number of Muslims who home-school. In the Washington area, Martinez says, she has seen the number of home-schoolers explode in the past five years.<\/p>\n
Although three-quarters of the nation’s estimated 2 million home-schoolers identify themselves as Christian, the number of Muslims is expanding “relatively quickly,” compared with other groups, said Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.<\/p>\n