POLKWANE – “I grew up in Baberton and served as a member of the Red Cross Movement where I assisted in caring for under privileged children in diverse communities around Mpumalanga,” she explained.
During her service most of her time was spent delivering healthy food parcels to families in need, assisting children with homework and contributing towards community development by assisting those in need through motivational talks.
“I also did research into various educational games and programs I could roll out to make learning fun for the children and in do doing encouraged their love for learning. This also helped to develop mostly moral and ethical behavior in the children,” she added.
After leaving the movement she started working as a teacher at Bethel Christian Academy (A.C.E) but later resigned as she wanted to focus on her family and raise her two sons. She says after leaving the school she missed teaching children and decided to persue her God given purpose and passion by teaching her own children after school to help them perform better at school, by helping them grasp their school work.
“After having faced a very difficult time with my family, financially, I prayed to God to help us and give me an idea to help give my family a better life and that is when I started having visions of starting my own school. I started off with just one child, a two-year-old girl and was amazed at how fast she grasped the work that I was teaching her. I taught her basic numeracy and literacy skills and this opened my eyes and I introduced more children into my programme,” said Lefember.
In 2011, she then started Care Bears Daycare as a home based day care facility in Westenburg and says the response form the community was remarkable. “This pushed me to enhance my knowledge in developing young minds and in turn ensure the preschool grows and fulfills its vision and mission which is to teach, develop and help young children grow.”
She attended workshops hosted at Polokwane Child Welfare and learned a lot from their insights regarding children’s education. Thereafter she completed her qualification in Early childhood development (ECD) with SSRATA. “This allowed me to understand that each and every child is unique and that they learn differently, this enabled me to not only teach the children but to also invest in them for a lifetime as foundation phase education is important,” she added.
She advises parents to enroll their children in learning centres at an early age as learning early helps a child progress individually.
