Thursday 18 July 2019
Workshop 17, V&A Waterfront, Dock Road

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. (Nelson Mandela 8 May 1995) Do you feel as a society we are failing our children? Every single child in Lavender Hill has experienced or witnessed some form of trauma or violence.

Join our Mandela Day Maker Space to create calming corners for preschool classrooms, a place where children can go to help them self-regulate.

2 timeslots currently available:
11h00 – 12h07, 12h30 – 13h37

Book one or more tables of 6-7 people at each slot. Each table will have all the components and ingredients to make and pack your classroom calming kit in 67minutes.

We ask that a donation of R670 per person can be fundraised ahead of time. This can be achieved a number of ways, but we also assist with a crowdfunding toolkit to support champion pages on back-a-buddy: https://backabuddy.co.za/charity/profile/in-reach.

During your 67 minutes, you can engage with women who run ECD centres in an area where violence and poverty impact significantly on every child in their care. Learn more about their struggles and how we can work together to lay a better foundation for education and employment.

If you have more than 67minutes, you can join our brain building workshop where trauma-informed schools specialist and trainer, Claudia Roodt, will take you through an exercise "building a brain". This will give you a good understanding of why our children struggle to learn and how their brains are affected by the adults in their environment.

Part of the funds raised through Mandela Day will go towards extra support for the teachers, for them to be able to debrief or reflect on behaviour they’ve experienced in class, a scenario that happened with a child, or just something they’re struggling with personally.

Parent involvement is another huge influence on the child and this is something Learning in Reach is working on, to create a program to support and educate parent’s to be the parents that they want to be.

What we can ensure is that children are well supported so that we can maximise the benefits of their early learning. These are the foundations that will take them through their school careers and into the job market later in life. These are the critical years of brain development and have a huge impact on their social, emotional and cognitive development.