Emyezweni News June 2007

Grade R Trips.
Thanks to the Ukuthasa sponsorship of Grade R places we have been able to take our oldest children on an outing to Helderberg Nature Reserve. Twenty five children and eight helpers spent a very enjoyable morning exploring the flora and fauna of the Helderberg Mountain following a natural world treasure hunt. We had an enormous lunch and the children enjoyed playing with bats and balls and exploring the stream until it was time to go home. For most of the children this was the first time that they have been to the nature reserve and seen the big tortoises, Bonte Bok, and amazing plants and views of the mountain up close. Lots of follow up work was done back at school and we are now planning our second outing, this time to the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town.

Child Protection Policy.
Emyezweni staff have been very busy working on our child protection policy, we held workshops with parents, staff and children to identify areas of concern and how we can best protect our children in our own particular situation. The staff then spent a day in the holidays drafting a policy with a provisional list of procedures in order to implement the policy. The parents and children were then consulted and the policy was revised and finally written up! We are very conscious that our child protection is a huge area of concern and we plan to regularly update and revise our policy with new parents and staff. One practical outcome of our work in this area has been to set in place a fire and gun procedure that has resulted in some wild role play and fire practises recently!

Grade R school Places .
This time of the year is when we begin the procedure of searching for school places for our Grade R children. The local Primary School in Lwandle is very overstretched and the classes are huge (50 children being the average class size) with very little resources and overworked staff. As a result some of our parents want their children to go to other schools in Somerset West and we have to prepare children and parents for interviews and generally help with the admissions paperwork. This year we have been able to build on good relationships with two main schools and we are hoping that all of our children will be successful in their applications.

Extra English lessons.
As part of our preparation for admission into non-Xhosa speaking schools we have begun extra English as a second language classes for our most able pupils. These sessions are very practical with lots of role- play and fun activities; so far the children have been on a sleep over to an English speaking family and visited the cinema to watch the film 'The Reef.'

Training.
Vathiswa Hela and Nomasanto Ndlovu, two of our teachres are continuing to work hard and enjoy their level one Child Care and Development training which we have been running in Lwandle with the help of Share Educare a local adult training centre. The students have been regularly visiting Emyezweni to see best practice in the areas of play, early maths work and classroom management, which has made Emyezweni staff, feel very good and has encouraged individual classes to work hard on display and planning.

Networking
We have continued to develop relationships with other crèches and pre-schools in Lwandle and our neighbouring township of Nomzamo. Our school doctor, Susan Bingham has provided some excellent training on identifying skin problems in young children at our last two network meetings and we are planning some training on nutrition and classroom management for later in the year.

Logo
One of our supporters from the UK, Sally Spires has created a logo for us, Sally used pictures from the children and our mission statement to make us a logo which really captures our heart for our children and we have been busy putting it on our correspondence and paperwork. We are also looking into using it to make School T-shirts ready for next summer.