Learn To Play - Ithute Go Tshameka

Uplifting Africa Through Play

3 out of 4 children fail to reach their potential in cognitive development because of poverty, poor health, nutrition, and lack of early stimulation. At LTP our mission is to make play-based early childhood education accessible in Africa through playgroups, training, and positive parenting programmes. Quality early learning should not be a luxury.

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HundrED 2022

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Overview

HundrED has selected this innovation to

HundrED 2022

HundrED 2021

Parental Engagement

Web presence

2017

Established

11K

Children

6

Countries

Target group

Community

Updated

June 2023

Our vision is a world where quality early childhood development is not a luxury - for EVERY child to have access to quality early learning whilst being nourished, protected & cared for. Despite their race, class, refugee status, geographical location or background, we're working with parents, community leaders, employers & educators to shape future generations on the African continent.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

In Botswana, 93% of children under the age of 5 do not have access to Early Learning & fail to reach their potential in cognitive development. Poverty, poor health and nutrition, as well as the lack of early stimulation holds these children back. In 2017, Priyanka founded Learn To Play with the vision to ensure that access to high-quality early childhood education was a right and not a luxury.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

Through our playgroups, educator training & positive parenting programmes, we ensure:
Increased access to quality childcare i.e. more children who are well nourished, meeting developmental
milestones, protected from infection, disease, violence & toxic stress;
More children in childcare means more women entering the workforce;
Strengthening family-child relationships
Uplifting livelihood opportunities for once marginalised women;
Advocating for policies to enhance quality standards for early childhood care & education industry wide;
Break cycles of poverty, violence & crime (evidenced by Heckmann equation).
We’ve already uplifted the lives of more than 12000 children and their families, educating 42
mamapreneurs & over 200 educators.

How has it been spreading?

Since 2017, we've opened operations in 11 communities and we've seen how education & nurturing care are intrinsically linked. We've learnt how important a dedicated, child-centered play area is & how working in strong partnerships can do more for a community than any single organisation. We provide healthy snacks for each child in our playgroups and parenting programs are being launched in all our communities to help build vibrant villages.
We've prioritized mindfulness, child protection, social and emotional development, and creativity in all our programming. Our mission is to make play-based early learning accessible in Africa. Quality early childhood development should not be a luxury.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

We thrive on partnerships and provide trainings on our unique approach to educators, schools and organisations across the globe. Learn To Play offers different play-and-learn products, courses, and toolkits to demonstrate how scalable and easy to implement our approach is. Contact priyanka@learntoplay.org if you want to play for impact in your community.

Impact & scalability

Impact & Scalability

Learn to Play is empowering communities by equipping mothers with the knowledge and skills to lead early childhood education lessons and help facilitate enriching play environments. This scalable model changes mindsets on education in lower income communities and empowers women in the community.

HundrED Academy Reviews

This seems highly effective and easily scalable. Empowering mothers to become engaged in their children's education from the beginning is an important way to ensure they continue to feel invested in their educational outcomes, and it seems the mothers here receive a lot of support to do this.

Establishing this innovation in disadvantaged communities where poverty is high and most children don’t have any exposure to early childhood education, is a brilliant idea. This innovation has a high potential to scale as it creates opportunities for children to learn about themselves.

- Academy member

Academy review results

High Impact
Low Scalability

High Impact
High Scalability

Low Impact
Low Scalability

Low Impact
High Scalability

Media

A big highlight of 2022 was attending the HundrED summit in Helsinki, Finland. Priyanka presented a workshop on learning through play, with a special emphasis on our mindful play programme. We also got the chance to co-present with the wonderful people from BRAC Tanzania and Bangladesh, Susan Bipa and Mofakhkharul Islam. We are so grateful for this incredible experience!

We recently returned from an incredible week in Uganda with Children on the Edge Africa, where we trained 120 teachers on child protection, social & emotional development, mindful play, and creativity for young children. We're thrilled to be part of this incredible impact by partnering with Children On The Edge to nurture every child's wellbeing, giving them a happy and healthy start to life

D-Kar Training - In August 2022 we trained 7 teachers and 3 teacher's assistants in D'kar between Mosaico and the VDC school. In return, they impact over 120 children The Training covered the below modules: 1. Early Brain development through play 2. Motor skills 3. Let's play literacy 4. Let's play thinking skills 5. Mindful play 6. LEGO playbox

Mindful play - Developing our mindful play program for playgroups and educators has been a big highlight. The impact of mindfulness on children is powerful as it helps children calm their bodies and minds. This creates a positive and relaxed environment that can benefit behavior, communication, and emotional regulation.

Dukwi Refugee Camp - Launching and successfully operating a playgroup for refugees

Kavimba Centre 2022 also marked the launch of our early childhood education center in the Chobe Region.

The Parent Playbox 2022 marked the year we joined forces with the incredible team from Kids collab to create the powerful Parent Playbox. Each box is carefully curated with 24 activities to encourage positive parent and child relationships, improve parental engagement, stimulate healthy growth, and improve the quality of ECD at home. This means happier families and lifelong learning!

Dukwi Refugee Camp training

Trained 4 Mamapreneurs in Dukwi Refugee Camp (Bostwana), serving displaced children from Somalia, DRC, Rwanda, Uganda and others. Built a model for mindful play and early learning playgroups in refugee camps across Africa.

Yoga and mindfulness with mothers and children in an inner city park

Outdoor play with Mamas in Kavimba

Go Baby Go training and resources, contextualised and translated into Setswana for wider accessibility.

Positive Parenting workshop in Kacgae, a San bushmen community in Botswana.

COVID-19 Response: Home-Visits

In light of playgroups being closed, our Mamapreneurs will be doing home visits and providing each child with their own unique play pack; they will engage with the children at home and support parents through a caregiver support programme.

COVID-19 Parenting Tips with University of Oxford and University of Cape Town

Parenting can be difficult even at the best of times; for many of us, it’s even more stressful now - especially for families living in poverty and for children experiencing isolation and toxic stress. Learn To Play is proud to have helped the teams at The University of Oxford and University of Cape Town translate their parenting support posters for COVID19 into Setswana, making them accessible to families who need this information and support the most. https://www.covid19parenting.com/setswanaWe share these through parenting support groups via WhatsApp to parents and caregivers across Botswana.

The Learn To Play team

Pictured here are all our fabulous Mamapreneurs from across the country, our Play Rangers and staff - celebrating each other and what we do.

Consortium of Pre-Primary Data and Measurement in Africa - Rwanda

Represented by our Board Chairperson at the prestigious consortium, we found that the presentations were insightful, reflecting the difficulties yet importance of data collection to catalyse impactful change. We are one of 9 African countries using the MODEL tool in our Monitoring and Evaluation for Learn To Play playgroups.

Play-At-Home: COVID19 Response

Our WhatsApp group and Play-At-Home packs give parents and caregivers weekly activities to enhance resilience and explore possibilities to support themselves and children of all age groups and learning stages. The play at home kit covers 6 key areas of development as per our Rainbow Play Approach: Social and emotional development, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, language and literacy, cognitive and numeracy, fantasy and creative play.

Creating a play-based curriculum

Our curriculum covers 15 themes for early childhood development that are contextulaised to the communities we serve, and cover social and emotional development, fine motor skills, literacy and communication, gross motor skills, numeracy and cognitive skills as well as creativity and imagination.

Training over 80 early childhood teachers in rural Malawi

In 2019, we spent time serving communities in Malawi and training over 80 teachers in the The Rainbow Play method, sustainable play programmes, positive behaviour management, literacy and child protection training.

Mobile Mentoring: COVID19 Support to 200 families

The WHO warned that effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns on at-risk children include anxiety, uncertainty, separation, disrupted routines and lack of safe spaces to feel loved, cared for and stimulated. To this end, we also launched our Mobile Mentoring programme to support families to continue playing, learning and thriving together despite the national lockdown. Our Playgroups may have closed but our interventions continue. That’s nearly 200 families around Botswana who benefit from weekly support calls from our team who are checking in on all children enrolled with us to see how they are doing. We have been coaching caregivers on simple play at home ideas; offering guidance on government and World Health Organisation COVID-19 policies and providing assistance and information wherever we can to keep their happiness levels high and anxiety low.

Sustainable Play Kits as a COVID19 Response

Currently, we are intensifying our efforts to bring Play to children at risk of isolation and neglect. With the uncertainty of when playgroups will resume, we are creating individual play-at-home kits for every child enrolled in our programmes throughout Botswana. The activities are open ended and cover the 6 key areas of development as per our Rainbow Play Approach: Social and emotional development, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, language and literacy, cognitive and numeracy, fantasy and creative play.

Nature Play

One of our mandates is community conservation and sustainable play. We use what we can find around us to build key skills in early childhood development.

Food security and sustainable entrepreneurship through organic vegetable farming

Empty streets can mean empty plates for many in our communities.Before lockdown, we made sure that our Mamapreneurs replanted their vegetable gardens for winter so that they would have some food security for themselves and their families. They have reaped a wonderful organic harvest recently, with enough to feed their own families and others in their community.

Ecostraws made by Mamapreneurs from the Chobe Floodplains

Our Mamapreneurs make straws from reeds found on the Chobe riverbanks, these are then sold to lodges, restaurants, schools and cafes as an income generation and livelihood support project for families living in poverty. Plus they're eco-friendly and serve our mandate of community conservation and sustainability.

Clean water and hygiene interventions

Through our mobile mentoring, we identify families on a weekly basis who still need help with food and essential toiletries. While most have been assisted through the government food hamper scheme, some households didn’t receive support. We have been able to reach out and support these families with essential food hampers as well as toiletries & cleaning supplies including laundry soap, body soap and sanitary pads. Through our mobile mentoring programme we have been chatting with families about access to water and soap. For those that don’t have access to running water, we guided and encouraged them to build a tippy tap. Over the last few weeks, families have built tippy taps in their yards and communities; they’ve shared pictures back with us of what they’ve made.

Mamapreneurs getting certified in First Aid

Mamapreneurs in Six Bricks LEGO Training

Six Bricks is a low-cost, high-impact programme from Care For Education and the LEGO Foundation. We have been trained by the team in South Africa to provide 6 Bricks and Playbox Training to impoverished communities in Botswana and received generous donations of LEGO/DUPLO bricks from them to support our interventions.

Conservation & literacy through stories and hand-painted story-stones

One of the communities where we work is called Kavimba; it is in what is known as the "wildlife corridor" where it is common to have wild animals such as elephants, lions and buffalos in the area and communities have been coexisting with these animals for many generations. Our mission here is to cultivate this ethos of coexistence and community conservation from an early age.

Sustainable numeracy and cognitive development

Fine Motor Mats & Home-made Books

Sustainable Play in a San Bushmen Community

One of the communities where we work is home to the Kalahari bushmen. They have been nomadic most of their lives and are now putting down roots to secure education and other opportunities for their children and themselves. They specifically asked for an early childhood programme in their community and we work closely with their tribal leadership to celebrate their indigenous cultural practices, art, skills and heritage - integrating them into our programme.

Learn To Play / Ithute Go Tshameka

https://youtu.be/FGTxES6yhUE

Implementation steps

Support our work

Click here to donate now and be a part of our impactful work!

Partner with us

If you are interested in partnering with Learn To Play to implement our high-impact programs in your context; receive our Rainbow Play training; conduct research on early learning in impoverished communities; or provide employee provided childcare at your organisation, please get in touch with us at priyanka@rewaedu.org

Consult with us

We can add value to your early childhood programmes, provide parenting support and enhance your community work through our unique Rainbow Play Training, Lego/Duplo Play Box and 6 bricks training and more. Contact us on priyanka@rewaedu.org to find out how we can help you create a more playful, nurturing impact.