By Alicia Carter | Marketing Manager
Over the holidays, children and youth came to our Community Centre to skate, play, and read books while others traveled to visit family. Now, 2019 has started off with a bang!
In our After-school programmes we added one new class this year, but almost every class has grown in size and excitement! Our first week of After-school lessons began with ice-breakers, fun games, and art activities to introduce ourselves and start learning about our identity. Do you remember After-school Facilitator Janet from two reports ago? Janet (pictured below) facilitates Grade 1 and is most excited to read Odd Dog Out by Rob Biddulph with her class. Stories are a big part of our Creative Learning Curriculum and helps us take a new approach to teaching game-changing skills like empathy and self-esteem. Odd Dog Out is a story about a dog's life in New York City as she tries to find her place in the world although she doesn't quite fit in. It's lonely being Odd Dog Out and she's willing to go to the other side of the world to look for her place, but it might take a different kind of journey for her to discover that maybe where she's meant to be is right back where she started. We love stories that help children and youth in our community figure out their identity and OWN it.
If you haven’t seen the new video about our After-school Programme visit the link at the bottom of this report to see just how much your support makes an impact!
In our Early Childhood Development programme there were many new smiling faces at the start of January. Although some children were crying because they were missing their guardians, their tears quickly disappeared when the fun began! Our curriculum includes discovery walks, story time, academic lessons, physical activity and more. At the playground, kids get to be free and have fun with their friends. Early childhood development lays the foundation for a child’s life-long learning. To truly make a lasting impact in a child’s life, it is crucial to provide them with socio-emotional, physical, linguistic and academic support so that all children have the opportunity to thrive.
We also made an ECD Programme video, check it out below! Your support creates so many smiling little faces every day.
We’re most excited that we expanded our reach in early learning at the end of 2018 with a new pilot programme called Fun Foundations. The programme began because we noticed that many Thanda farmers (our third core programme) had their children or grandchildren with them at the farm because there was nowhere else for their young family members to go. In fact, across the twenty-three Thanda farms, there are 84 children under the age of five, many of them spending their mornings at the farm because crèches are too far away. This lack of educational stimulation can dramatically impact their early learning development. Luckily for them, Manager of Thanda ECD, Nokuthula, had the idea to take ECD to the farms so more children had access to quality learning opportunities. Of the farms we work with, some crèches are as far as 4km away, which doubled as a journey there and back, is too far for little legs to walk every day!
Fun Foundations playgroups take place from Monday to Thursday every morning, when the farmers are working. These playgroups are led by paid Fun Foundation volunteers, who have been hired from the community and are being training by a partner organization, Singakwenza. Currently we have 44 children enrolled across six farms and anticipate expanding in the years to come once we establish the success of the pilot. Nafisa, Fun Foundation volunteer said that she has learnt so much from being a teacher to the children in her playgroup, saying “I have also learned how to help them grow and learn. They can sing rhymes and name colors, or count to five or ten. They know the differences between big things and small things, and they have respect for one another like brothers and sisters.”
Thank you for continuing to create essential growth in our programmes like Fun Foundations. We can’t wait to see what we can achieve together in 2019!
Love,
Thanda
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
