The "Lief vir Lees" programme, initiated in 2008 by the Afrikaans Department of Kingswood College and the Lebone Centre, aims to encourage an interest and love for reading in Afrikaans, facilitate improved reading skills for all the learners and create opportunities for mutually beneficial social interaction. The grade 8, 9 and 10 Afrikaans First Additional learners from Kingswood meet weekly, as part of their curriculum, with grade 4 and 5 Home Language learners from their partner schools, Grahamstown Primary, George Dickerson Primary and St Mary’s Primary.
The "Lief vir Lees" programme, initiated in 2008 by the Afrikaans Department of Kingswood College and the Lebone Centre, aims to encourage an interest and love for reading in Afrikaans, facilitate improved reading skills for all the learners and create opportunities for mutually beneficial social interaction. The grade 8, 9 and 10 Afrikaans First Additional learners from Kingswood meet weekly, as part of their curriculum, with grade 4 and 5 Home Language learners from their partner schools, Grahamstown Primary, George Dickerson Primary and St Mary’s Primary.
The programme now functions within a larger literacy drive, "The Comprehensive Literacy Outreach Programme," which is being facilitated by the Lebone Centre.
Over the past few months, new elements and partnerships have been introduced that are taking the programme to the next level. Examples of this are:
A partnership has been formed with the local Community Library. This involves the teachers of the partner schools and library staff meeting on a regular basis to discuss the progress of the participating learners, as well as giving the learners the opportunity to listen to Storieman Audio books at the Library. These are used in combination with printed text to enable readers to develop their skills.
The learners of Kingswood and the partnership schools are taking turns to read from a series of ghost stories in preparation for an "Evening of Shared Reading" planned for 26 October. The teachers, learners and parents of all the partnership schools have been invited to participate in this proposed event that will celebrate the age-old traditions of story telling and of reading together.
The need for learners to have their own personal reading material was identified and this resulted in the preparation of a file with a variety of literacy materials for each of the 45 participants. These include stories, games, puzzles and fun exercises that the learners can complete in their own time and will help them to take ownership of their own reading development.
To ensure continuity between the enrichment programme and the learners’ day-to-day environment, teachers from the three primary schools were given a colorful box with a small collections of books and posters in order to kick-start the book corners in their classrooms.
A group of Rhodes third year Journalism students are supporting the programme as part of a Service Learning Project for the JDD (Journalism for Democracy & Development) course. This will result in a range of media outputs that investigate, profile and promote the literacy issues in that area.
