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…
Playing Freya
Language and literacy learning during early childhood, is an integrated process of storying through play and exploration. Closely observing young children’s experiences, offers adults contextual understanding which enables them to meet early learning needs in holistic ways. In the first of two pieces…
The nurturing nature of play
Rich, pretend play underlies our ability to understand the symbolic nature of written language. But it’s much more than that too. Pretend play also has the power to comfort, help solve problems and leads to empathy and understanding. This is the theme of…
Connecting bears and frogs
PRAESA Storyplay mentor, Sive Mbolekwa reflects on a session with the picturebook, If Big Can… I can by Beth Shoshan in an English medium preschool. The story uses a relationship between a big brown bear and a small koala bear to explore the…
Storyplay in Action – At the Clinic
Seeing is believing, but one has to know what to look for – and in South Africa, we need demonstrations of high-quality early literacy teaching and learning which revolve around imagination and stories. To reclaim story is to find the key to meaningful teaching and...
“Chairs, chairs for sale” – the golden nugget of the day
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…
A story worth telling…
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’ of the story
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.
A sad day when children felt unsafe in class
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.