Johannesburg - “Can I borrow your hair, please?” It’s fantasy time at Cotlands in Bellavista, Joburg, and the young girls, dressed up in brightly coloured evening gowns with matching purses, are exchanging wigs.
Fantasy, where children dress up and imitate various characters, is part of the early learning programme at Cotlands, an NGO for children.
During this lesson, the pre-schoolers learn about themselves and are taught about their bodies and gender, one of the learning areas that forms part of the organisation’s two-hour programme.
Held every second day, the high-impact programme covers baby stimulation, nursery rhymes, art, maths, colours and shapes as well as science experiments.
Cotlands operates in five provinces and has more than 8 000 beneficiaries.
The learning areas that are offered are aimed at developing all aspects of a child’s growth and getting them ready for their school career.
Despite the fact that the value of preschool learning is well documented and evident, it is estimated that more than 70 percent of South Africa’s children under 5 don’t have access to early childhood learning.
And because of a lack of skilled personnel, not all children in early childhood development centres, or crèches, are getting the cognitive development they need to give them a solid footing for their future learning.
The first 1 000 days of a child’s life – from conception to two years – are regarded as the most crucial to a child’s development. How the child fares academically hinges on the stimulation they receive and the environment they’re in during these formative years.
Speaking at the organisation’s launch of the First Thousand Days campaign last week, Cotlands chief executive Jackie Schoeman said: “In the first two years of life, every interaction impacts brain development. These early experiences with parents, caregivers and other adults have as much influence in the way a brain develops as good nutrition, mental capacity and physical well-being.”
Someone who has seen what the lack of stimulation does to children is one of Cotlands’s early learning facilitators, Patience Tshabalala.
She alternates between two sites in the Joburg city centre – Wings of Hope in Jeppestown and the Moths building near Park station. Wings of Hope is an NGO, and Tshabalala uses some of the rooms as her classrooms.
The Moths building, like many other buildings in the city centre, is a health hazard. It has three floors, and residents share the kitchen and the bathroom. The rooms they live in are divided by curtains, not walls.
The council estimates that there are 45 children under 5 who live in the building. The families there are mostly made up of foreign nationals and South Africans from rural areas. Unemployment is rife.
Many of the adult residents don’t have identity documents and their children don’t have birth certificates, so the families can’t access services like social grants, healthcare and education. Children, even some who are of school-going age, aren’t in school.
Tshabalala said that when they first set up in the building and brought in educational toys, puzzles, books and the like, many of the children were seeing these things for the first time.
She said that apart from not being exposed to any form of schooling or educational material, the children also didn’t have a safe place to play.
Tshabalala said one of the babies she was seeing during the baby stimulation and massage classes had severely stiff limbs because he didn’t have the freedom to crawl around at home and wasn’t being physically stimulated.
“After the baby is fed and bathed, the mom puts him on her back,” Tshabalala said.
She said the mother couldn’t let her child loose to play around and explore because the building’s floors were filthy. And the baby was always on his mother’s back.
Tshabalala said she had to put together a pamphlet for the mother, showing her how to do the massages so that she could continue doing them at home.
For the older children, Tshabalala said it wasn’t just their families’ circumstances that prevented them from accessing schooling, but some of the parents refused to let their children attend lessons even after she had set up on the building’s ground floor and was teaching the children, at no cost to the families. “Some of the children would come by themselves. You’d see that they just rolled out of bed and came down. They know the days I’m here.”
Tshabalala added that through scheduled visits by nurses and social workers, the early learning facilitators were, through physical check-ups and medical care, able to pick it up whether the children were reaching their developmental milestones as they should.
Social workers assisted with things like getting grants for families and helped children with their psycho-social needs.
Lois Moodley, national marketing and public relations manager at Cotlands, said facilities like the toy libraries, which were stocked with educational toys and games, also assisted children who were stressed and who had gone through traumatic experiences through play therapy. Activities like kneading dough helped the children with stress relief.
Through the campaign, Cotlands hopes to raise awareness about the importance of the early days of a child’s life.
Schoeman said the fact that parents tended to wait until their children reached the ages of six or seven before enrolling them for schooling meant they were always trying to catch up. - The Star