literacy development

Today is World Literacy Day and we’re big fans of reading, whether its with a book or via a screen. But, most of all, we’re even bigger fans of cuddling up with our kids for a good old bedtime story. The benefits of reading to children when young, and reading with them later on are well documented but, what we feel can’t quite be encapsulated in research, is the...

The Sunday Times, in partnership with PRAESA (The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa), recently launched the Sunday Times Nal’ibali Storybook in four new languages. As part of the Nal’ibali national reading-for-enjoyment campaign, the storybook called ‘Storytime’ was introduced for the first time in English last year. This year, through a generous donation of funds from readers and the Little Hands Trust, and in...

It's International Translation Day, and so it is an appropriate day on which to ask: Why is literacy important? The answer is simple: We will never succeed economically, or as a society, if we are not literate. Literacy remains the key to unlocking South Africa’s success and yet both numerical and linguistic literacy continue to evade us. As a multilingual, multicultural society, social cohesion and deep learning can happen only if we create a plethora of “literacies” in...

David Harrison is the CEO of the DG Murray Trust, core funder of the Nal’ibali campaign, and shares his opinion on why access to books and stories is every child's right. This article originally appeared in the Cape Argus, 23 April 2014. Every Tuesday, an enterprising church minister from Rondebosch packs a box of theatre props and heads out to a nutrition rehabilitation centre in Crossroads on...

Dr Carole Bloch is the director of The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA), which is driving the Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign. Her own experience of reading is one that brought her to where she is now:   My favourite time all the way through school was at the end of a day, when our English teacher would say, “Put everything away,...

Have you wondered why there is so little continuity between learning in the foundation phase and the wonderfully rich invention that characteris es learning in the preschool years? Well, there is no abrupt turnaround in how young children learn just because they move into a school system. The enormous learning strides that children make before Grade 1 should continue by leaps and bounds. Having some...