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…
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.
Sive Mbolekwa, PRAESA literacy mentor, reflects on his day in the classroom and the emphasis on obedience over choice that he observes. How will the children whose choices are so curtailed become the active citizens South Africa needs, he wonders…
PRAESA director Dr Carole Bloch recently published a column in the Sunday World on the Nal’ibali campaign, aimed at developing multilingual children’s literature: We are all aware that increasing attention has been focused on the development of reading culture and on...
Early childhood specialist NADIA LUBOWSKI co-ordinates PRAESA’s Storyplay initiatives. Here she shares some observations about her baby’s language learning process. One Sunday morning we had a family brunch…
In his insightful book, The Rights of the Reader, Daniel Pennac comments: “When someone reads aloud, they raise you to the level of the book. They give you reading as a gift.”
People who love reading know the precise value of that gift. But there are those who cannot read, both children and adults – and they should be remembered this September, in Literacy and Heritage Month.
With our schools buckling under the weight of too many children and too few resources, Grethe Koen looks into the South African civil organisations teaching our kids how to read.
The aim of the Q&A series is to get an inside look into some of South Africa’s leading education academics, policy-makers and activists. This is the twenty-third interview in the series. Carole Bloch is Director of PRAESA.
In South Africa, most of the adults who spend time with children in their various capacities as parents, teachers, caregivers, adopters or custodians, do not regularly read aloud to them. And even if they do, with repeated readings of favourite storybooks, most can’t sustain the activity long enough for it to become a habit.