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…
In our Storyplay work, we try to create respectful spaces for children to be curious and imaginative learners. We’ve found this process to be extraordinarily enriching for enabling central aspects of language…
By early childhood specialist Nadia Lubowski, who co-ordinates PRAESA’s Storyplay initiatives. It is Zoe’s Educare’s second birthday and I went to deliver some storybooks PRAESA donated to celebrate this small but wonderful beacon of…
The ‘what if’ is what happens when we open up the book and allow it to expand our boundaries. We switch thinking from inside the book to a wider, new world of possibilities.
As I get to the class, the three men are searching the children’s bags and the children are sitting quietly on the mat and looking at the men. This is their classroom, their place of learning, their place of having fun but for those five minutes or so it doesn’t feel like their classroom.
As the imagined worlds neared completion, the children noticed that there were now materials and resources around the classroom that they could use to bring the dragon and its environment to life.
As we neared tidy-up time, we asked the teacher what she felt the children had covered from the curriculum. She spread her arms wide and exclaimed “ All of this, look! They have done home language, maths, cutting and painting, sticking, playdough and building, spelling, writing and reading. All with ONE STORY.”
Children wrote messages to the mouse family and taped them to the walls of the mouse library. The children also went to write stories in the little blank books to add to the library collection and displayed them on the shelves.
Sive Mbolekwa, PRAESA literacy mentor, reflects on his sessions with Grade R children using the picture book An Extraordinary Egg by Leo Lionni (IQanda elinguMmangaliso). In this story, three frogs discover a…