Strengthening families in the Southern Drakensberg
Families living in rural areas have very little opportunity to develop and extend their literacy skills. They live in what can be described as print poor environments: they have little access to books and materials for writing and drawing; newspapers and leisure books are non-essential items for households struggling to provide enough food to eat; and environmental print is almost non-existent. Parents and carers typically have had very little schooling and, in many cases, have lost their basic literacy skills through lack of use.
The Family Literacy Project (FLP) was set up in 2000 to help young rural children to learn to love reading and writing. We believe it is important to strengthen the support that families provide in the development of early literacy skills. By working with families, literacy in the home is strengthened and young children are stimulated at developmentally appropriate stages.
Our programmes include working with adults, teenagers, primary school children and pre-schoolers and running community libraries. We place great emphasis upon health – mental as well as physical – as we believe that without this, no Education Initiative will thrive. We work in 15 villages in the Southern Drakensberg in KwaZulu Natal. Sessions are held in community halls, churches, schools, homes and community libraries supported by FLP.
Where we work
Our team members work in the Southern Drakensberg, in deep rural villages and in the rural towns and low cost housing developments of Underberg and Himeville.
We use school classrooms, community halls, churches, homes and community libraries for our sessions around Bulwer, Underberg, Centocow and Mzimkulu.
We also run sessions in Goxhill Primary School, the Jabulani Community Hall in Himeville , Noah’s Ark preschool and Underberg Primary School in Underberg.
In 2013 we purchased a new training and resource centre in Underberg, generously funded by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, which we use as a base from which to visit our various sites in the district, and for our team meetings and training workshops.
Adult groups
Twice a week adult members attend sessions to improve their literacy skills and learn more about topics that interest them. The sessions draw heavily on the Freirean based Reflect approach which respects what people know and can do and encourages discussion on the relevance of new information provided by the group facilitator. Sessions are organized around a topic. Topics include early childhood development, health promotion, relationships within families, cultural practices, and household budgeting, to name a few. Members develop action plans relating to the topic, to improve conditions in their homes and communities.
Group members learn to read and write in their mother tongue of Zulu, before moving on to learning English.
Home visiting
As group members learn more about how to safeguard the health and promote development of young children, they want to share this information with their neighbours. Many FLP group members are part of the home visiting scheme and visit families with young children. They play with and read to the children and pass on key messages relating to health and well-being to the adults.
Community libraries
As in all deeply rural areas of South Africa, libraries in the Southern Drakensberg are few and far between.
The seven FLP libraries are open to the whole community and provide a range of leisure and reference books in Zulu and English for adults and children. Facilitators who do not have library buildings keep boxes of books at their homes.
Each library has a reference section to help teachers and children with project work.
Men and teens particularly enjoy visiting the libraries to read Zulu newspapers. Early in the life of the FLP, the lack of books in plain language and depicting rural life was noticeable. Project staff produced several books that are still available to FLP members.
Each library is opened daily by a library assistant who also runs story telling sessions for local children. These assistants are women who joined FLP to improve their literacy skills and learn more about preparing children for reading and writing.
FLP runs holiday programmes which have been a great success. Activities include reading, listening to stories and drawing, making craft, and playing various games that build early learning and literacy skills, and encourage children to have fun. Some parents were reluctant to let their children off household duties during school holidays to attend these sessions but were easily won round when they saw what the children produced and witnessed for themselves their happy faces.
We have built playgrounds at the four libraries, and erected fencing. These playgrounds are often the only recreational facilities in a village, so the local children flock to the libraries to enjoy the play equipment.
Reach Out to Read
Reach out to Read is a community development initiative which forms part of the services offered by Family Literacy Project. Reach Out to Read focuses on the development of literacy in the form of teaching of reading at home, in community libraries and within schools. It provides teacher training and support to selected unemployed youth who are called Reading Champions. We work in 15 rural sites in the Harry Gwala, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Umzimkulu and Impendle Municipalities of KwaZulu Natal.
isiZulu Reach Out to Read is an evidence based, structured, systematic and explicit reading instructional programme, developed through collaboration of reading specialists and the Family Literacy Project. The programme has been piloted in deep rural, non-fee-paying community schools since 2014 and is currently the only evidence based, explicit phonics isiZulu reading programme in South Africa.
Reach Out to Read aims to make reading fun and interactive through the use of our robust, colourful, well-structured kit, while providing remediation to struggling readers. Recent summative assessments provide proof of the success of Reach Out to Read as children in local schools are reading at levels up to 3 years above their chronological age.
We believe Reach Out to Read has the potential to solve the existing reading crisis in South Africa.
Library News
FLP continues to explore opportunities to provide libraries in deep rural communities where there is a paucity of reading matter, in any language not only isiZulu. We have recently been contracted to establish Community Libraries in Zululand and will begin in 2024 in Nsiwa Primary and hope to establish many more libraries over the next couple of years in partnership with Mondi.
The community library model we have developed since 2000, will be implemented and training will take place in the use of the English and isiZulu books we carefully curate and get into the sites. These books will be the supporting materials for the Reach out to Read Programme which we will implement simultaneously to opening the library, making reading the shared and valuable skill that is so critical to progress within our country.
Counselling Groups
In order to integrate formal psychosocial support into our work, by working with children and families, individually and in groups, our trained Facilitators run an 8 week programme, which is repeated for various groups throughout the year. Our main focus is using play and listening, to support children and their families to cope, as they adjust to a range of emotional challenges ranging from loss, HIV and poverty. Supporting families to help their children, strengthens the adults as well. Children are counselled to feel that they are worthy, that there is someone protecting them, that they are safe and that they belong and are liked. We run groups in rural schools as well as individual counselling for children should the need arise. We are planning on expanding this valuable work beyond counselling groups and individuals, to include other forms of therapy that have been effective in our community work. We wish to include Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprogramming (EMDR), Sand Tray and Play Therapies. Funding permitting, our wish is to expand into all the FLP sites. Referrals for this work comes through the schools, the SAPS Child Protection Unit as well as the DOSW.
Reading Clubs
Primary school children participate wholeheartedly in the FLP Reading Clubs. We receive newspaper supplements from Avusa media for every child, which includes a little book to cut out and make up. We develop learning units for our facilitators that promote activities such as reading, listening to stories, drawing, playing games, and generally having fun.
The children borrow books and happily share what they have read with others, marking the number of books read on their Reading Maps. As these are mixed age groups the children reach their ‘goal’ after reading a developmentally appropriate number of books and receive a small prize. Such incentives help children develop the habit of borrowing books and soon enjoy reading and stories.
Reading campaigns
We encourage children and adults to read by running Road to Reading Map campaigns. For children, the campaign runs all year. Grade 1 and 2 children have to read 5 books to receive a prize, and grade 3 children have to read 10 books. Many children read more than 10 books in a year. In September we celebrate literacy month by running a campaign for adults to read to children. When adults read 10 books to their children, they receive an incentive. These incentives make a big difference to the number of stories children are listening to, and help our learners build the habit of reading. We find that children who no longer qualify to participate in the campaign continue to borrow books from the libraries.
Young girl’s groups
Girls of 9-12 years learn about their changing bodies, develop a vision for themselves for the future, and learn to set boundaries in their relationships. This programme came about due to many girls as young as 14 years becoming mothers. The extended programme which we introduced in 2012 includes the new FLP material on careers, with the aim of broadening young girls’ view of their career options.
Teenage groups
These sessions provide relevant information on HIV/AIDS, relationships, career guidance and Emotional Intelligence/social skills, to young teens. We use Units developed by FLP on careers that cover topics such as aptitude/interest, self-assessment test for teens, job lists of jobs available, tertiary institution applications through the Central Applications Office as well as the Auntie Stella materials that give teens an opportunity to share their views and feelings which they do not freely do at home or in the classroom. Time is also made available for reading during the sessions and for borrowing books. FLP has developed material for a new range of books, the “Big Ups” Fundza Series, that are proving very popular amongst the teens. The topics covered in the sessions draw on the theme of the stories and include “The Secret Enemy, The Good Girl, Courage Like a Lion, Never Again, Stubborn Love, Dream Girl, The Big Crush and Trust”.