Cross Roads Background and First Meeting

Crossroads is one of the largest townships in South Africa. Situated near Cape Town

International airport.  It borders Nyanga, Phillipi, Heideveld, Gugulethu and Mitchells Plain.  

It began in the 1970’s when workers were told to leave a white farm and move to 'the crossroads'. Finding only bush, they built shacks and established a community that afforded families more scope for creating individual, respectable homes than the hostels of Guguletu.
As Crossroads was considered a temporary camp by the authorities, eviction orders were made in 1975. The battle to save Crossroads from destruction became a major battle of will between the government and the opposition movements during the late 1970s and 1980s.
Today, Crossroads is home to over 38000 people, ninety percent of whom have Xhosa as their first Language.

Project Crossroads:

On a cold wet Wednesday in August my colleague and I visited Siphamandla Educare in Crossroads. This was my first time in Crossroads and I was a little anxious after hearing stories about the high crime rate in this community.

The place looked crowded and it seems that there were people everywhere you looked. Mandisa, my colleague said that this was typical of “township life.”

Virginia, the principal of the Educare was waiting on the street and directed us into the gated area of the school.

 We met the group of trainees- They are so excited to meet us and enthusiastic to start!

19 March 2014

Last Day of Philosophy

It’s a nice misty day walking from the Phillipi Station to Tsonga Centre. As I approached the gate, I saw a group of men standing by the entrance of the 

centre. When I went inside to the room that facilitation takes place in there were groups of people and inside the building there was a buzzing of people. I went to Mzi who is he co-ordinator of the facility to ask what was happening. 

The room we normally used is occupied, he told me we could use the other room which was smaller than the one we normally use. 

I then asked him to tell Nikki of what was happening because the space he was giving us was not enough to accommodate all the ladies. He came back to me allowing us to use the other room which we used before for the literacy workshop. Finally we started our last day of philosophy.

I got so fascinated when one of the ladies was sharing her story on how important observing children is. She told us a baby died in her school. The mother brought the sick baby to school and didn’t tell her the baby was sick. She put the baby to bed. When it was nappy change routine, her mother noticed that baby was not breathing. She called the ambulance and they told her the baby had died. She told us that if she received information on observations, she believed that would not happen in her school. 

Mavis pointed out how she learnt and enjoyed the prepared environment. She told us that before she knew that she needed to prepare the environment for promoting effective learning, all she cared about was the safety of the children and that they had their meals. 

5 March 2014

I was so pleased to see all the ladies, only one was absent from the group. 

Performing philosophy lectures to the ladies was a great experience for me.

I learnt deep on how humans develop and how the sensitive period works, 

before I thought there is only one sensitive period, but now I learnt that 

sensitive periods are born, become very strong then die and new ones are born. 

The ladies also had great input because they also brought examples of what they 

were experiencing in their schools. As their facilitator I also learnt something from them. 

Ok so we haven't been blogging for a while! But things have really been happening at ELF ...keeping us too busy to keep you updated. 
No excuse - we know...but after many requests, we agreed to get blogging again.

We will upload some posts from the project (which were written a while back but just not uploaded) ...and to make up for the long silence, we have some amazing videos which we will be uploading soon!

So watch this space!!

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!

Ladder to Literacy Project Begins!

Ladder to Literacy Blog

So many amazing moments has occurred since the day Niki walked through the ELF door in 2012. Niki is from an organisation called Ubomi and she approached us in her quest to find materials for the schools she provides aid to. These schools exist in townships on the fringe of Cape Town in two areas called Samora Machel and Kosovo. We partnered on the “Nurturing the Spirit of Learning in Kosovo” project last year. Our partnership has brought much inspiration, friendship, challenges, opportunities and development of human potential.

This year we embarked on the Ladder to Literacy project.  Our focus is to provide the teachers in "Nurturing the spirit of Learning in Kosovo" project with teaching skills in how to teach literacy to young children in their schools. The Literacy workshops will run over five sessions meeting once a week in Samora Machel.

Session One:

A warm sunny winter’s day in the townships. I approach the Tsonga environmental centre in Samora Machel, as I take the corner I see some school children making their way to school. I meet Mandisa, my co facilitator. We empty the boot of my car with all the equipment we’ll need and we head inside to set up. I was amazed at the beautiful architectural structure of the building and surprised I haven’t noticed it before as I’ve driven past it so many times on my way to Kosovo.

Once all the teachers had arrived we started our introduction to Literacy, what literacy is and why it is important. We spoke about the natural universal way children learn their native language, the teachers could relate to this, sharing experiences of their own children. We moved onto ways to help children develop literacy, with Mandisa translating as we went along. After our tea break we demonstrated pre literacy vocabulary enrichment activities which the teachers got to practice.

The activities were done in Xhosa and we had a hiccup when it came to the ‘I spy’ game,  as I’ve discovered that most of the Xhosa words begin with an ‘i’…..ihagu, ikama, ikati  and so forth.

After the practice session the teachers head off to the tables to make literacy materials for the children in their schools. This was a huge challenge for the teachers as their lines were skew; they struggled to cut strait and even paste straight. Many had to redo and needed close guidance to perfect their material making skills. Patience is virtue.

When asked who read every day, only two of the fifteen teachers raised their hands, I assumed that the others only read every now and then. When I asked why not, they replied that they did not know the importance of reading to children and they did not have any books. We ended our session with a word of encouragement to read to children every day.

Going home to my three children this very afternoon, I pondered on how fortunate they have been to have such a sure start in life to literacy. And I realized the ever more importance of this Ladder to Literacy project for the children in Samora Machel and Kosovo.

Long Walk to the Playground

The day starts with toddlers being dropped off by their parents for the day - fifteen little ones in one room. The teacher is creative; with little resources she has them singing, dancing and moving. Then comes story-time, nappy changing. Snack time follows. There is little else. These fifteen children are confined to this 2 x 4 meter room for the day. The teacher is afraid to let them out onto the playground for fear that they will be trampled by the older children.

Today, however is a landmark day! The children are visiting the playground for the first time this year. They will have exclusive use of the playground, before the older children come outside!

On the other end, in the classroom with the 4-5 year olds, things are abuzz. After the morning group circle, children are invited to choose “work”/activities from the shelves. The Practical Life activities were prepared the week before by the Ubomi teachers.

The Ubomi teachers are encouraged to invite the children and introduce them to the “new work!” The children look animated and willingly engage with the adults. Their concentration and interest is apparent from their facial expressions.  They are so eager to choose activities. 

Soon however, chaos reigns!  The activities on the shelves are incomplete and/or returned to incorrect places. To add to the chaos the teachers over-mediate and direct the children, sometimes to the extent of doing the activity themselves without offering the children the option to try.

Overall, the morning work time is busy with a flurry of activity and energy in the classroom. The debriefing session encourages reflection on behaviours, attitudes, skills and feelings around the morning events.  Consensus was reached around preparation of environment, the importance of modeling the grace and courtesies and body management required from the children and adults alike in the environment.

While the teachers were at tea, we quickly set up the environment with the help of Tosh the class teacher. Tosh’s energy and enthusiasm to share her resources with us enabled us to set up a Practical Life, Language, Sensorial and Art area with sufficient activities for approximately children!

Exhausted but satisfied we left Kosovo with the firm conviction that tomorrow will be a new day full of concentrated activity for the children of Kosovo!