As many of you know I’m currently seconded to the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Endowment to develop the “Funda Wande: Reading for Meaning” program. The aim of that is to equip teachers in no-fee schools with the resources and training they need to teach reading for meaning by age 10 (this video explains it well). We have now also initiated a sister program for Grade 1-3 mathematics: “Bala Wande: Calculating with Confidence.” The program is headed by two of South Africa’s mathematics stalwarts: Ingrid Sapire and Lynn Bowie and includes a formal collaboration with Nelson Mandela Institute’s Magic Classroom Collective who have been working in this area for a long time. The aim is to develop fully bilingual learner activity booklets and video-based teacher guides for Grade 1-3 in all South Africa’s official languages. The big aim is to delink price and quality, and offer “best in the world”, in African languages, openly-licensed and widely available. If the pharmaceutical industry can create ‘generic drugs’ (same quality but MUCH cheaper), we can do the same with early learning resources!
The policy at Funda Wande (and Bala Wande) is that open is always better than closed. Everything we make is Creative Commons licensed and freely available for download. We also have a rule that everything we provide to our intervention schools must be available on our website and on our YouTube page within 2 weeks of it being delivered in our schools. Anyone is welcome to download and use any of our materials for free, and you don’t even need to ask us for permission to do so (but it’s nice to know who’s using them so please do! 🙂
Today we uploaded our first mathematics materials and I am very proud of them. They are the isiXhosa Grade 1 Term 1 Learner Activity Booklet and the corresponding Teacher Guide. Please take a look at them and share them with anyone who might be interested. We are currently running a Randomised Control Trial (RCT) in the Eastern Cape to test the efficacy of the materials and teacher coaches (Grade 1 in 2020; Grade 1+2 in 2021; Grade 1+2+3 in 2022) – more to come on that in due course. Here are some excerpts from the Learner Activity Booklet and Teacher Guide:
But check out the full Learner Activity Booklet and Teacher Guide (and bilingual Gr1-3 Mathematics dictionary) – all resources are available on our website: https://fundawande.org/learning-resources
We are always looking to collaborate with people who are passionate about Grade R-3 mathematics in South Africa. If you’re an expert on Foundation Phase Maths and speak an African home language email your CV to ingrid[at]fundawande.org and we can see if there are ways of collaborating!
Watch this space 🙂
Nic Spaull 