Easter school holiday programme is resounding success
Vision AfriKa’s one-week Easter school holiday programme was such a success that the learners even asked to come back for more.
About 80 students participated in the programme, which started at 9am and finished at 2pm each day after lunch, during the first week in April. The aim was to teach them useful skills while ensuring they had fun. A further goal was to strengthen their relationship with the facilitators in order to build trust.
Each day, different groups of learners were able to take part in five key activities:
- Arts and culture – Learners of all ages worked as a group and undertook drumming and dancing. They also made piñata out of balloons and coloured paper and wrote about what they dreamed of doing in five years time
- Basic computer skills – Grade 8 and 9 students were given an introduction to PCs and the Microsoft Word word processing application
- Life skills – The topics discussed here included self-esteem and self-awareness, relationships and teenage pregnancy
- Recycling, re-use and reduce – Learners were tasked with using rubbish they found at home or on the street to create new and interesting things. The theme was “My vision for Kayamandi”
- Sport – Students played a range of games, but one of the favourites was ‘frog soccer’, where they crouched down like frogs and used their hands to help them walk while kicking the ball with their feet. Others included holding a balloon without using their hands, playing hula-hoop and running sack races.
On the final day, volunteers from Japanese distillery Suntory visited to play games with the learners and have fun. Those students that had attended the programme all week were also provided with a small gift by Vision AfriKa as a token of appreciation for their efforts outside of school time.