Education for Children in Rural South Africa

With over 800 children from the Mtwalume community enrolled in our Early Childhood Development and After-school Programmes this year, things have been busy! Your support provides opportunities for these children to gain creative life skills and a meaningful education, and for that, we cannot thank you enough. To ensure all children enrolled are able to enjoy the activities on a full belly, Thanda provides a nutritious meal every day. So far this year, we have served 41,797 meals, and most of the vegetables within each meal are from our Organic Farming Programme.

This year we expanded our ECD class from 19 to 60 children. Every day our ECD learners start the day with a morning song that is based on the theme they will be covering that day. They then have an interactive discussion around that theme, participate in art activities and enjoy story time before their nap. They also get an opportunity to work on counting, puzzles or their fine motor skills with plenty of time to play.

Throughout the After-school programmes we use stories as a base for all activities, This provides the children an opportunity to develop their literacy skills and allows them to identify with characters in the engaging activies. As the children love reading (between January and May they had borrowed 2633 books from the Thanda Library), we now have a mobile Librarian who attends each school to ensure that all the children get a chance to take out a book. 

For an example of how we use stories to create a theme for the After-school activities, our Grade R&1’s watched the Spiderman movie and then discussed the definition of a “hero”. Through this theme, they learnt about spiders, made anagrams using letters of the word spiderman, and made their own spider webs by weaving wool. Another example covered this year is how the Grade 2 & 3's read The Giving Tree, and followed that with a discussion about their responsibility to look after their environment while learning about trees, the water cycle, and pollution.

Your contribution to our programmes ensures that these vulnerable children are given a fair chance in life - they feel empowered to break the cycle of poverty and have hope for their futures. We look forward to sharing with you what we cover in the second half of the year and, on behalf of everyone in our community, extend our deepest gratitude for your support.