The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) is a non-governmental organisation focussed on multilingual language and literacy development. Our work in language and literacy approaches, curricula, training, content development and research has meaning-making, stories and imagination as its compass point. PRAESA’s aim is to ensure that children from all language, class and cultural backgrounds have appropriate opportunities to become imaginative and critical readers and writers.
Storyplay is an approach to early literacy teaching developed by PRAESA that focuses on enabling meaningful and imaginative literacy learning in young children. It is aimed at transforming the literacy learning opportunities of young children from birth to six years old.
Anton Lucien’s first story
Nadia describes a literacy event, in which he comes to dictate his very first story, which she writes down for him. Such small stories, are what drive language and literacy development and learning, though in the busy-ness of home and school life, their significance can be underestimated, or ignored…
Feeling at home with literacy
Multilingual story-sharing
Listen to and follow the delightfully animated story of Kimi’s Cat. Adults and children can join in and read words in any of the 11 South African official language versions. There is also a story-sharing demonstration in English that can be used with teachers and parents to discuss ways of sharing storybooks with young children.