The Steven Davison Primary School, established in 2010 (when the first classrooms were built by Lionsraw with support from the Rotary Club of Kloof) and positioned in the valley below Inchanga, is running essential literacy workshops but needs your help to continue!
Sadly, the quality of teacher training in KZN, especially for those working in the foundation age group in primary schools, has deteriorated over the past 10 years. It has now reached a point where many, if not most of these teachers have qualified just through online courses, with little attention paid to how to teach children to read and write. As a result, the teachers do not have the skills to teach these essential basics.
To overcome this problem, we are funding training facilitated by Angel, an experienced and professionally trained teacher who used to work at Inchanga Primary, where the language levels, both Isizulu and English were good. Because of her experiences at Inchanga, she knows the challenges faced by the teachers and pupils in the area. Angel has now trained a group of teachers in her current school and along with Angel, these teachers are passing on their skills to other teachers through partnership teaching in specially provided literacy workshops.
The trainer teachers, class teachers and 170 children, all attend the school on Saturday morning for 4 hours from 9.00am to 1.00pm, after which the children are given lunch – feeding the children is an essential part of the school day. Through the course of the sessions, the trainers work alongside the class teachers, teaching the children together. Prior to this, the class teachers had received some training and were introduced to simple resources such as letter cards, by Angel and her team. Through partnership teaching the class teachers are supported while putting their new skills into practise.
Although the priority is to work with Grade 1 and 2 children, they have also been working with pupils in Grade 5 and 6. Already, after just 5 sessions, the results are fantastic – the pupils are making excellent progress. Overseeing the whole project is Mr Nkosi, the principle at the Steven Davison Primary School, ensuring that best practice is carried out and good quality teaching is maintained beyond the Saturday workshops.
The four teachers leading the training workshops are only charging for their travel costs, which is necessary as they all live a distance from the school, at least 1 hour by car and nearer 2 hours by local/public transport.
The cost of each weeks’ training and teaching workshop is as follows.
Teacher costs: 4 x R700.00 = R 2800 @ R20 to £ = £140.00 (£35 per teacher)
Food costs: approximately R600 = £30.00
So that is £170 per week which amounts to just £1 per participating child!
So far, with the help of Lionsraw, we have raised enough money for 8 weeks of training, but now desperately seek funding for at least another 4 weeks, more would be wonderful!
If you can help to support these essential literacy training and teaching workshops, please donate here. No donation is too small, every penny goes a long way and makes a huge difference. Thank you!
We are a registered UK charity raising funds to support children impacted by HIV and AIDS and rural township schools. All money raised goes directly to the projects.