#SALockdown: Stories to keep young minds distracted
Story-time for children during lockdown.
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 20 April to 1 May 2020, on the MANCOSA website, which is spearheading this initiative.
The 5-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.
Mhlope 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.
The Department of Basic Education has not yet announced when schools will be re-opened.
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