News & Articles

This International Picture Book Month, Nonikiwe Mashologu shares why picture books aren’t just nice to look at, but are an essential part of children’s literacy development. One of the main reasons I found myself in the field of children’s literature was my love of the imagery that often goes together with the words in children’s books. I’ve always loved the art, colours and textures that…

Mandla Langa is an accomplished author whose book The Lost Colours of the Chameleon won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award for Africa., and his latest novel is The Texture of Shadows. Mandla speaks to us about growing up reading in a world where books were not a priority: I grew up in Mayville, Durban, as the fifth child in a family of nine, including my parents….

Nal’ibali Story Power book boxes are a practical and artistic way to get your child to fall in love with books, reading and creativity! Help your children to make their own Story Power book box, which they can use to store their favourite books and stories. They can keep it next to their beds so that reading and books become a part of their everyday life –…

What do you do when you’ve stared at the same problem for years but still cannot figure out how to solve it? You frame it differently and see it through someone else’s eyes. So the next time we hold a big education summit in South Africa, we don’t invite educationists, but civil engineers. They might picture the education system as a high-rise building, but would not…

Maureen du Toit, from Haenertsburg, is the founder of the website funeconomix.co.za which features her stories, workbooks and talks and where you can ask Whyman a money-related question. Maureen du Toit loves the colour purple. She wears it often. It is the colour of prosperity, she explains, which is probably why the characters in her books are “perky, pointy, purple people”. Du Toit has spent the…

Peter Gray, research professor of psychology at Boston College (Massachusetts, USA) has conducted and published research in neuroendocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He also authors a regular blog called Freedom to Learn, for Psychology Today magazine. He speaks to us about the role of reading in developing empathy: Empathy is believed, by many psychologists, to be the biological foundation for morality.  To empathise is…