The national and provincial departments of education have been delivering special “packages” to hundreds of schools.
These are lock-up metal boxes on wheels with everything a grade one educator could dream of to teach reading: posters, books, stationery, flash cards and a manual.
Education Minister Naledi Pandor, Deputy Education Minister Enver Surty and provincial ministers have been dropping off these toolkits at schools that are in need of resources.
The materials are available in English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and isiXhosa – with materials in the other languages and for grade two to follow soon.
Palesa Tyobeka, deputy director-general in the national department of education tasked with general education, says the toolkit is a special provision for quintile one and two schools – schools serving the poorest communities.
“These schools are often in rural areas, with under and unqualified teachers who do not always have access to training programmes run outside government to which their urban peers have access,” she says.
Tyobeka says the persistent poor performance from schools in these areas and a realisation that most teachers actually has neither the resources nor the skills to teach reading effectively prompted the department to develop the reading toolkit. Originally the department wanted to develop only a handbook, but it soon realised the limits of this approach.
“The minister was very impressed with a teachers’ toolkit the British Council have developed for teaching English at high school level. While working on the ‘manual’ (which has already been sent to all schools under the title Teaching Reading in the Early Grades) we realised that for many of the poorer schools the challenge would be where to get the resources we refer to in the handbook. (We) decided to put together a box that would have the manual and everything that the teacher needs to teach reading effectively. We copied the idea from a school in the United States – the Calvert school. What we wanted was a comprehensive resource for teachers,” says Tybeka.
The toolkit lends itself for use from the moment a teacher begins teaching reading in grade one.
“It is anchored on the expectations of the curriculum and shows an effective cycle for teaching reading in grade one. From using the conversational posters in the box to teaching children the necessary vocabulary to using the individual levelled/graded readers that are also contained in the box, it will allow children to read at their own level and for the teacher to be able to assist children who are at the same competency level,” she explains.
The box also contains the Early Grade Reading Assessment instrument that enables the teacher to establish what progress the individual learners are making.
Tyobeka says the department hopes to instil confidence in teachers to teach their learners effectively and to improve learners’ performances. The various provincial departments of education are working with the national department to put in place procurement processes of their own so they can supply toolkits to more schools.