Ladder to Literacy Session 2

15 August

Another warm winter’s day in Cape Town. Today I have Shelley in the car with me, she is a very good ex colleague of mine, and we worked together at a Montessori pre-school some three years ago. I had always remembered she was interested in outreach and here she is kindly volunteering her time to help with the Ladder to Literacy project.

I fill Shelley in about last week’s session as we are making our way to the Townships. I tell her about the disturbing discovery that only two out of the fifteen teachers read to the children in their care and they do not have any books. I also tell her that upon sharing this information with my colleagues at our ELF offices their response was “Not having books is no excuse not to read to children.” You could make up stories, use magazines, newspaper, and even draw. As I think about it, they are right; we live in a world where there is literacy all around us. The teachers need the right encouragement and understanding of the importance of this literacy in the child’s world.

I tell Shelley about the material making session, how the ladies struggled to rule straight lines, cut straight and paste straight. Shelley knows the importance of presenting beautiful attractive materials to the children. She offers to help in this area, much to my relief and gratitude. Patience is a virtue. We arrive; we unload the car and set up the materials. The ladies arrive and we start our session with a recap of last week. Here the ladies role play and practice the activities covered last week.

This week’s session focused on activities to prepare the child for handwriting, from working with sandpaper letters, how to hold a pencil, to making patterns using a pencil to name just a few. All of the activities are practical and most can be easily made. The teachers happily agree on this. Some of them share that they have black boards and paper and scissors but it never occurred to them to demonstrate to children how to cut lines or make patterns with a pencil or chalk board. They very easily understood the importance of helping the child develop good hand muscle and hand eye coordination.   They were very quick to link the activities to the practical life activities covered last year. It is heart warming to see such progress from the teachers.

As the demonstrations and practice continue, Shelley is busy in the background, cutting card with the guillotine and laminating the materials already done by the teachers. This was a huge time saver and the teachers looked forward to finishing off their materials to take to the children. I know our Ladder to Literacy project has just began, the teachers are slowly piecing all the information together and I’m thrilled but at the same time I am concerned about introducing Xhosa literacy. There are such limited resources for Xhosa.....guess it’s time to put on our creative hats!