“Play turns out to be stunningly essential in childhood, it’s like love, sunshine and broccoli, all juiced together.”
Lenore Skenazy
Our Early Learning Programme at Die Bron Primary School in Stanford and the Masakhane Primary School in Gansbaai have been busy. The First Term is all about getting to know the children we are working with. We have been screening children and implementing play-based activities with our Grade R learners. We currently have 56 children attending the programme, in small groups every week.
Our focus in the first half of 2024 was parents education. We participated in parents’ workshops at Masakhane Primary School, Die Bron Primary School and at Funimfundo Pre-school, and reached approximately 150 parents. The workshops we presented were on how to enhance children’s Fine and Gross Motor skills at home.
Thank you to our collaborating schools, Die Bron Primary School, Masakhane Primary School and Funimfundo Pre-Primary School.
We are back on track for our Arts & Cultural Appreciation Programme with our music mentor, Manuel Jardine, teaching children how to play guitars and the recorder, and Jack Lerole Junior has been mentoring children in playing their penny whistles. The children have been deepening their knowledge of reading music and playing music on their instruments.
Our 2 Visual Art Mentors did beautiful projects in the arts with the children.
Artist Antje Shone’s classes in Masakhane at the Grootbos HUB buzz with excited children and the number of children attending grows by the week.
Thank you Grootbos Foundation for your continued support of Creative Skills Factory.
Artist Tracy Algar worked with us at Die Bron Primary School through the the first 2 terms, facilitating beautiful art projects with the Grade 1 and Grade 2 learners.
The Drama classes with Raine Waring are running at the Stanford Community Hall with the committed group of children working in earnest on their drama techniques.
The Learning Tree is always a busy and active place.
Our Team has grown, we now have 2 young assistants who have joined our team.
At our centre, we offer regular reading clubs and literacy groups, art and craft, movement, music for the community children and for our team, art teaching training provided by Tracy Algar.
In April, we were blessed with a visit from Rachel Adams who is an experienced teacher from England and while she was in South Africa, she ran a training workshop on reading for our Team. The Team learnt how to effectively present books and stories to best serve the children who attend the Learning Tree.
Rachel also brought some wonderful resources with her for the community’s children. Thank you Rachel 😊
The second school term ended with a colourful puppet show at the Learning Tree during the school holidays performed by Beauty Dumileyo, a professional puppeteer who brought the Easter story to life for us.
Greetings,
from all of the team at Creative Skills Factory
