Mission and achievements

Our mission:

Wordworks aims to strengthen early literacy and language development in disadvantaged communities through targeted early intervention and the delivery of proven programmes and resources. Wordworks seeks to enable all children to fulfill their learning potential by empowering parents, teachers, community members and volunteers to play a meaningful role in facilitating the early acquisition of language and literacy skills.

Our work and achievements:

Wordworks helps to build networks of collaboration across communities. Our programmes bring together teachers, parents and care-givers, community members and volunteers, empowering those involved and enabling a transfer of skills and knowledge back into the home and community contexts.

In most of the communities where we work, programmes are driven by community facilitators and volunteers. In this way, we are achieving our aim of empowering communities to play a role in raising literacy rates and in transforming the lives and prospects of their children.

Since 2005, Wordworks has set up programmes to support early literacy and language development at schools and libraries across the Cape Town area. We have trained over 200 volunteers, one third of whom are from local communities. Through our Early Literacy Programme, these volunteers provide over 1000 children from Grades R to Three with weekly support. Evaluations have shown that at schools where we are working, increasing numbers of children are reading and writing at the expected grade level.

Through the delivery of our Home-School Partnership Programme in 28 schools and three libraries, more than 850 parents have been empowered to become more involved in their children’s learning.

In partnership with the Centre for Early Childhood Development, we are working with teachers at 20 pre-schools to ensure that learners enter Grade One with a solid foundation for learning to read and write. We will use this pilot to develop resources that we can share with other pre-schools from 2012.