Support Primary Education for Vulnerable Children

Thank you for your support of our Primary Education programmes! This recent term was a big one for our kids in developing their public speaking skills. 

In March, the gade 6 & 7 group completed a community maps project that they presented to their peers. As you can see from a photo below,  most learners were very shy and did not want to face the audience or covered their mouths when speaking. 

In May those same students performed a play on the book "The First Slodge". They read the First Slodge to learn about the concept of entitlement. 

To prepare for the performance of the play, the facilitors played games and exercises to improve the children's presentation skills and confidence in speaking in front of others. After weeks of these exercises and many hours of practicing, the play was performed for an audience of grades R, 1, 2 and 3 children and some of the other Thanda staff. The presentation skills and confidence of the grade 6 & 7s showed a marked improvement as you can see from the photos. 

The group also utilized their art skills and our art centre to create all the props for the show themselves! 

Thanks to your support, our learners are gaining more and more self confidence each day. This confidence will enable them to make healthy decisions in their lives and improve their school work. They are seeing all that they are cabale of. 

Thank you again - we couldn't be doing this without you! 

Love, 

Thanda

Thanks to your generous contributions, our Primary Education after-school programme continues on. This year we added 100 learners to our programme - and there are more in the waiting line! 

To take a deeper look into the type of work we do in our curriculum, below are a couple of examples of how we use books to teach various themes.

The Gruffalo by Julia Donalson, is based on a traditional story. It teaches learners that cunning and smarts are more important than size. The story is especially important for us as the tale of a small  figure using cunning to escape a negative situation has deep African roots. Learners read the story, learn about different animal homes (both in the story and African animals), and make their own Gruffalo masks. 

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein is one of our top resources used across the board in our curriculum and training. We discuss imagery and look for meaning beyond the words. 

The staff discuss our relationship as humans as both givers and takers and how just because you are older, does not mean you have necessarily advanced. The boy may be a man, but is really still just a boy.

The tree thinks she is helping the boy and she isn’t. By giving him whatever he wants, she doesn’t treat him as a man and so does not truly respect him. This is a big topic for our staff training. We discuss having to grow up and take responsibility. If someone is giving you everything, do they respect you? We're saying to our staff, "we respect you enough to expect more of you."

This story is an especially good example of a story creating a space where the readers can be comfortable with paradox. Is the tree nice or mean? Both. Is the tree good to the boy? Yes and no. The story leaves the reader without a clear answer, which is hard to do any other way for a child. It is a shift away from the black and white reality, while laying the path for a grey scale and eventually full color picture.

The story books allow us to tackle large, scary, real world issues in an accessible, comfortable and more fun manner. 

Exposing our learners to these ideas and resources is essential in their developmental success, and something they are missing in their everyday school experience. 

Thank you for your continuing support to help us provide these much needed resources to this community.