The literacy workshops form part of Capsule, Coronation’s unique and holistic corporate social responsibility programme that was launched early in 2018. Capsule integrates all of Coronation’s main CSI partners into a collaborative, measurable programme serving the full ecosystem surrounding a primary school. Says Coronation Group Head of Marketing Wendy Bergsteedt, “We empower contributors from the whole community with skills to help them rise above their challenges, with a core focus on education in literacy and numeracy. As such, the literacy workshops are aimed at teaching parents simple ways to encourage reading at home and to ensure their children learn the power of words.”
Education & TrainingCoronation 4 Apr 2018
The power of words
When it comes to learning how to read, parent involvement is the number one predictor of early literacy success and future academic achievement. “Reading skills are critical to your child’s development and overall success in life. Supporting your child at home will therefore strengthen their ability to learn at school,” adds Bergsteedt.
In collaboration with their CSI partner Living Through Learning, Coronation shares five tips that every parent can use at home to help improve their child’s reading skills:
- Make reading together a daily routine for you and your child.
- Read your child’s favourite books over and over again to ensure understanding and build confidence.
- Ask your child questions about what they’ve read. Ask them how it relates to life and what they understand it to mean.
- Include role play to enact the meaning of a word.
- If your child is old enough, give him/her a good dictionary so they can start looking up words themselves. Or a child can search for the definition online if he/she has access to a computer.
And most importantly, make it fun, says Coronation.
Bergsteedt adds that parents often don’t read to their children simply because they don’t have books at home. “To help address this need at our Capsule programme schools, we will be donating in excess of 500 books to parents and children on International Literacy Day.” The books have been collected by Coronation staff.
According to Coronation chief executive officer Anton Pillay, the business believes in establishing and contributing to long-term programmes that will result in meaningful change to people’s lives. “To date our Coronation Reading Adventure Rooms programme have been set up in 27 primary schools in the Cape region and have reached more than 16,000 foundation phase children since 2010.” He says that by adding parent literacy workshops, Coronation will be able to deepen the programme’s impact in the coming years. He concludes, “We hope that our literacy initiatives will go some way to help solve the education crisis in South Africa and that they will continue to inspire young children to better and further their education."
