STEPP PARTNERSHIPS
The vision of STEPP is to make excellent education accessible to all South Africans
1. EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
Umusa Wenkosi Pre-School, God's Little Lambs and Nkululeko Crèche partner with STEPP. The focus of these three Partnerships is to prepare the children for Grade One in:
- Number and colour recognition
- Puzzling and conceptual matching of colours, numbers or shapes
- pencil control
- Fine and gross motor skills
- English literacy
The ECD partnerships meet every week of the school term. The number of volunteers on the weekly visits allows for Small learning groups and greater attention to detail for each of the pre-school learners.
The remarkable bond that forms between volunteer and learner enables learning, socialisation, citizenship and role Modelling to take place in a reciprocal relationship. You can see in the pictures that much concentration is required at This age to complete the tasks and that the expectation of the learner is that they master the skills.
The volunteers are trained for their role through the following workshops:
- Pre-school observation in local schools
- Psychomotor
- Planning and administration
- Reading and literacy
ECD Monitoring and Evaluation:
In the partnerships, pre- and post-tests, observation and motor skill assessments are used to assess the children's School readiness. The following developments were noted in the partnerships with Nkululeko Crèche, God's Little Lambs And Umusa Wenkosi Pre-School:
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English Literacy
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Identification and verbalisation
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Identify pictures and name them in isiZulu and English
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Conversation
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Increased vocabulary and better contextual use of words
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Spelling out the alphabet and words in relation to pictures
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Spelling out words from their knowledge of the alphabet
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All of the children's colouring-in skills have improved and
Consequently their pencil control. Most of the Grade R children
are now able to colour in the lines
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The children are now able to use the correct colours that the
worksheet has instructed them to use without help from the
girls and are not hesitant as they work
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Shape recognition
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Recognised very few in the beginning of the year. The Grade
R children learnt all the shapes and colours by the end of the
Year. (The most difficult to learn was the triangle)
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Readiness Skills
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Pictures from the first and third
term are compared
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Pencil control and muscle strength have improved
considerably over the year
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They had to draw in the parts
of the face, and tell us what
each part was
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Learning different parts of the face. At the beginning of the
year we did a similar exercise on parts of the face, and the
Children got very confused between the nose and the ears. At
The end of the year they got them right.
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After drawing we sang 'Heads,
shoulders, knees and toes'
in the English and the isiZulu
version
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Demonstrated their understanding of the words in practice,
This was also fun.
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Numeracy
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Mathematical skills
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Number recognition was easy with much less hesitation
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Greater numbers recognised and verbalised than in January
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Ability to count further without aid
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Add and subtract
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Citizenship
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Language
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Volunteers understand greater number of isiZulu words
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