Welcome to 2012 at the Anna Foundation! The children are back and our projects are open with all the after schools running smoothly. It is always exciting to see how much energy the children have after a long break and we look forward to using this time to get them back into the swing of things. This year our focus is to equip the women on the farms with the necessary skills to manage their projects on their own by 2013. We have guided them in how to set their goals for each term and how to achieve these goals. Our new incentives will help motivate each woman to stick to her goals and ensure her project is running smoothly. There are loads of exciting fun runs this year with our very own Anna Foundation Run and Ride happening later in the year. The bikes are being serviced and will be returned to the farms, new games (including chess this year) have been sent to the projects and new readers and books are filling the shelves.

For the Anna Foundation lots of new developments await this year. We are currently in the process of starting up our rural expansion model. This will allow us to service farms in areas further afield. We start this expansion in Robertson, Ashton and Barrydale. The aim is to open these new projects by June this year. Lots of work to be done and many new children to service! Exciting times at the Anna Foundation!

We wish all our supporters an exciting 2012 in whatever it is you do!

Anna

At the start of the year we give our learners a few days to settle in to their new grades at school but the following week our after school clubs are open and ‘back in action’!  A number of new Grade R children are now a part of the Anna Foundation programme and teachers have their hands full with the addition of these little people.  

Due to the overwhelming heat in the first week, at some farms the children spend an afternoon building jigsaw puzzles which they thoroughly enjoy.   Many children struggle with puzzles but they are a wonderful tool to help a child with increasing dexterity and hand-eye coordination (and this also assists us in getting all the pieces back into the correct boxes!). The puzzles are now evenly distributed between our projects and these will rotate every few months so that the children are kept on their toes.

As an academic warm-up to the year we spend the month focussing on language skills and maths revision. The Grade R – 3 children discuss different themes such as “the beach” and “seasons”.  They are shown a picture relating to a topic and discuss with their teacher everything they see. We encourage the little ones to think of their own experiences and express these thoughts verbally to their teacher and the other children.  The Grade 4 to 7 and high school students’ lessons are also based on various themes.  The lessons are aimed at increasing vocabulary through the use of dictionaries, putting words into sentences and writing short essays.  Each grade has a number of Edu-peg (maths) exercises which they need to complete and in addition to being valuable practice, the children really enjoy completing the numeracy questions and checking their own work with the peg-boards afterwards.  

We are pleased to see an increase in the number of children bringing homework to the after school clubs and encourage our learners to do so. We are also very grateful to our remedial volunteers (Truida Murray and Linmari Kruger) who return to their respective farms in order to continue their offer of valuable one on one support to learners in need.

At the end of last year we brought each farm’s reading books and sports equipment back to the office for sorting and stock taking.  Thanks to the assistance of volunteers Leané de Wet and Angelica Palmer, all reading books are now sorted and colour-coded according to their level and each farm has received a “library-in-a-box” with a wide range of Afrikaans reading books suitable for Grade R to senior learners.  These boxes will rotate between the farms every few weeks so that the reading material constantly remains new and exciting as we encourage the children to take the books home to read.  With the sports equipment being returned to the farms, we included a few recently donated tennis bats and rackets, hockey sticks etc. (thank you Jason Bourne!) as well as a few brand new gym mats. As the sports lessons are unstructured this month the children are given the opportunity to play and experiment with each new piece of apparatus and of course, have fun with the familiar skipping ropes, hula-hoops and rugby balls.

Scholarship Programme 2012

Welcome back to all our scholarship children. This year sees some exciting changes for these children with new challenges awaiting each of them.  For the first three years of the scholarship programme the Anna Foundation offered two afternoons of homework support at our offices for these learners.  Our aim was to give them a space to feel safe and a support teacher to assist them with homework as well as with all their school administrational matters.  2012 is most of these children’s 4th year in the programme and we feel it is now more important that they manage with greater independence and more involvement in their schools.  The high school children will be receiving extra tutoring in maths during the afternoons at their own schools this year giving them the opportunity to be more involved in other school activities as well. The primary school children will attend their school’s after care as well as sports lessons each afternoon.  Our scholarship coordinator remains the contact person and visits the different schools to ensure the children are progressing well. Once a term we invite all the children to our offices for an end of term celebration! Our bus continues to drive the children every morning and take them home every afternoon.

Gary, Glenda and Bianca have left the school scholarship programme in 2012 for family reasons and we wish them all the best in their new school. Their positions have been replaced by two new students, Jazzmin and Elzaan.  Next month we report on how the start of the year has been for these children, in particular for our two new Grade 8 learners!

• Klem Carstens: Financial donation
• Gerhard du Toit: Financial donation
• Lille Howe Trust: Financial donation
• Croft Trust: Financial donation
• Dr Brom: Financial donation
• van der Merwe Family: Contribution towards school tuition
• Anonymous: R500 donation
• 1%Club Members: We can't thank you enough for all you are doing each month!
• My Bookshop: Donation of Afrikaans Encyclopedias
• Radio Sonder Grense (RSG): Time on air
• Remedial Volunteers: Linmari Kruger and Truida Murray - continuing to assist at our farms on a weekly basis
• Part Time Volunteers: Leané de Wet and Angelica Palmer - for your help in the office