SoundStart: Audio Learning for ECD in South Africa

We’re delighted that the SoundStart pre-school teacher training will take place in April during the Easter school holidays.  As we noted in our last report, this project is not fully funded, so we’re launching SoundStart on a pilot or limited basis. This will enable us also to ‘course correct’, enhance and improve any aspect of the initiative prior to rolling it out more widely across Cape Town’s sprawling townships.

Our partner GROW Educare Centres have identified the most in-need preschools which are over-crowded, under-resourced and have poorly trained, but very willing teachers.  Teachers will receive comprehensive training on how to use our Lifeplayer MP3s as a teaching tool.  In addition, they will learn to work with the Wriggle and Rhyme early learning content.  This forms parts of the general up-skilling of teachers – dedicated and deeply committed local women who are not trained teachers, but are eager to help and to learn themselves.

A further challenge in many pre-schools is the mix of mother tongue languages.  In addition to English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, the children speak Shona or Ndebele from if they’re from Zimbabwe, French or Lingala from DR Congo, and Kinyarwanda from Rwanda.  Wriggle and Rhyme’s pedagogically sound content combines a mixture of singing, movement and rhythm using percussion instruments to make learning fun. The children love it.

After the training, the teachers will return to their pre-schools and begin using the Lifeplayers. They will be trained not only to keep records, but also in observation skills. They will need to observe children’s reactions to the songs, lessons and stories and note any improvement in skills and the interactions between the children. This will also provide useful data as we roll out SoundStart.

We appreciate your donations to SoundStart and sincerely hope you will continue to support this high-impact initiative.

Although the SoundStart initiative isn’t yet fully funded, we’re launching it early in the New Year. Given the immense need, our key partners GROW Educare Centres and Wiggle and Rhyme (the main content provider) are just as anxious as we are to get SoundStart up and running.

The first 8 township pre-schools have been identified in Cape Town that will receive our solar-powered Lifeplayer MP3 units. Most high-density townships are crime hotspot areas making preschools with outside areas either small or non-existent. Priority is being given to those centres which are under-resourced, over-crowded, have limited outside play areas and untrained teachers. Preschool teacher training facilities have closed in South Africa and there is little government oversight at this level as well. Therefore, many of the teachers are not formally trained and oftentimes other classroom support many be kind-hearted local women who want to help out.

These are also pre-schools which are convenient for working parents to drop their children off in the mornings and collect them in the afternoon. Parents who are mainly domestic workers, day laborers or petty traders, depend public transport such as trains, buses and mini-bus taxis to get to work and often have to leave as early as 0600 to get to work on time. Children might only be collected again at 6:00 p.m. This makes for long days for learners, teachers and caregivers alike.

The Lifeplayers will be loaded with pedigocially sound original music content created by South African musicologists at Wriggle and Rhyme. Music and acitivity lessons will be played in the mornings. The Lifeplayer will play engaging stories  in the afternoons to give teachers and caregivers a much earned break. As many of the children are from immigrant families, content is largely in English as English is the common language.

By the time of our next update, SoundStart will have officially launched and we’ll have a lot to share!