(Right: Gcina
Mhlophe)
Article
from the Berea Mail April, 24, 2020
Renowned story-teller Gcina Mhlophe, will
be hosting free 10-day online story sessions for children during the national
lockdown
The sessions will run from April 20 to May
1, 2020, on the MANCOSA website, which is spearheading this initiative.
The five-minute audio recordings will also
be available for free download on all of MANCOSA’s social media platforms.
Professor Zaheer Hamid, head of the MANCOSA
School of Education, said children need a digital diet that is both educational
and entertaining to keep them occupied during the lockdown.
“Lockdown must not only be about schoolwork
for children. They also need time to set their minds free to imagine, dream and
indulge in creativity.
“Our children have been in isolation for
the past three weeks. The first couple of days were spent delighting in their
newly found freedom out of school. But then what?
“As part of our humanitarian activities
aimed at giving back to communities during the pandemic, we decided to focus on
children by keeping them entertained with stories, even if only for a few
minutes each day for 10 days,” he said.
Mhlophe said she had chosen stories with an
African theme that would deliberately expose children to a wide vocabulary and
provide them with verbal and mental stimuli – something they would be missing
since the closing of schools.
“I have specifically chosen stories that
will take children’s minds somewhere else during these dark and gloomy days,”
said Mhlophe.
MANCOSA is a distance education institution
located in Durban, South Africa. It is a private higher education institution,
established in 1995 as a post-apartheid empowerment institution, offering affordable
and accessible management education primarily to persons previously denied
access to postgraduate education.
The Department of Basic Education has not
yet announced when schools will be re-opened.
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