Designed to keep reading and stories alive for children over the long summer holidays, Nal’ibali, the national reading-for-enjoyment campaign, has launched its 2015 Summer Reading Challenge. Set up as a story search on a special activity sheet, the challenge encourages parents and children to explore Nal’ibali’s range of online stories and keep up a reading routine whether at home, on the road or away. “The holiday period...

Seven-year-old Athandiwe Sikade of Khayelitsha in Cape Town has been announced the winner of Nal’ibali’s storytelling competition, Story Bosso.     The competition, designed as a nationwide talent search to get people of all ages excited about reading and telling stories, invited members of the public to send in audio or video clips of themselves reading or telling their favourite stories. “We collected more than 2 000 submissions from...

Children’s Grief Awareness Day is a reminder that children feel and experience grief and pain as acutely as adults. They may experience a wide range of emotions – anger, depression, confusion, frustration, anxiety – but they may not yet have the words to identify and express these emotions. And because they have not yet learned to verbalise emotions in the way adults do, children are...

Dr Garth Japhet is the founder and chief executive of Heartlines, a value-based media campaign and printed resource organisation. Heartlines has developed a series of books titled ‘Stories That Talk’, which assist educators and caregivers in encouraging early literacy skills and learning around values. Sally Mills (Nal'ibali networks and communications coordinator) and Japhet explore the role of stories in helping children cope, and understand difficulties and...