Parents of four- to five-year-olds at selected play schools in the Franschhoek area have been invited to an activation morning at the Ruach Christian Centre, 10 Mark Street, Groendal, Franschhoek, at 9am, on Saturday July 7.
The Reach Foundation will show them an innovative and free mobile solution that can boost their children’s schooling and help them to achieve their full potential.
CareUp is an app designed to improve early childhood development (ECD). It supports children’s home language development by guiding users through a series of literacy focused bite-size ECD content linked to activities, instructions and exercises. It was developed by the Reach Trust in association with Wordworks and funding was provided by Innovation Edge and the Western Cape Department of Social Development.
“Seventy-eight percent of Grade 4 children in South Africa cannot read,” said Andrew Rudge, CEO at The Reach Foundation.
“Access to and participation in early learning stimulation in the preschool years significantly enhances the ability of children to benefit from schooling. To increase access and participation, we came up with this innovative solution that better connects parents and practitioners to essential content that brings more words into homes and improves early childhood development.”
CareUp was launched in 2016 to a sample of 10 ECD sites in the Western Cape. After the success of this first pilot, the objective was to scale-up and reach more children. In 2017, an additional 100 ECD sites were on-boarded.
“CareUp gives me more ways to teach my kids with new ideas when I’m not able to come up with something for them to do,” says mother-of-three, Nokuzola Tatsula.
“I never used any other tools and resources to help me teach my kids. Now I find it more fun and easy to do.”
The event and download of the application is free and each invited parent will receive a goodie bag that they can take home to add to the learning fun with their children. Food, drinks and internet access will be supplied at the venue and parents will only be able to attend if they bring their invitation that they would have received through their child’s play school. They are also encouraged to bring their mobile phones fully charged so that they can download the app on the day and be able to start using it immediately thereafter.ot her real name.
