The School's Role

The purpose of the school is, of course, to prepare the children to be happy and successful when they start formal schooling.

Teaching them the skills they are going to need is an important part of this preparation but so is building their self confidence and an important part of this process is helping them accept and like the people they are.

At Pikkewyntjies it is the teachers’ role to create a warm, relaxed atmosphere where each child feels safe to try new things and to make mistakes and learn from them.

Everyone is encouraged to try their hardest and everyone’s effort is praised. Those with natural aptitude for an activity, be it painting or running or making a puzzle will naturally excel but the lesson will be to understand that people are different and have different abilities and happily praise the stars of the activity, whatever it is.

This naturally helps the children understand another very important thing - that if they would liketo tackle something they’ve always been scared to try, there’s a teacher to help them get startedand nothing to stop them learning to do it - if they put in the effort and practise. When that ballgoes into the ring 5 times in a row or they can finally write each of their numbers perfectly, eventhe number 8, or draw a horse so it looks like a horse, they will discover the sweetest lesson ofall, how good it feels to achieve the goal and receive recognition.

Not all the stories are happy ones. Sometimes there is a little child who struggles to learn and for whom reading and writing and arithmetic will always be very difficult to master. This is because the child’s mother drank excessively while she was pregnant or because the child wasn’t nourished in the early months of development. The preschool offers such a child patient coaching and love and builds confidence through mastery of other skills.

Since this is such a small community it is happily possible for the preschool to provide ongoing support and encouragement for such a child after hours and in the holidays.

Mandela Day 2025

The Harold Porter Botanical Garden in Betty's Bay has been a very good friend to Pikkewyntjies over the years. The school has been given trees to provide very welcome shade in the playground in Summer and one year a lorry arrived with a water tank to make it easy for us to water the trees and the grass in the playground.

This year on Mandela Day, the Gardens helped the school again, with six trees and they didn't just deliver them. staff members brought the trees and had the children help plant and water them. They were so good with the children who loved the experience.

Afterwards when they were all having rooibos and sandwiches, the children were surprised and interested to discover that trees don't only provide shade and somewhere for the birds to perch, but are very important in making clean air for people and animals to breathe.

The children visit their trees every day to see how they are doing.

The School's New Furniture

Thanks to the generous support of the Challenge Fundraiser the school was able to replace the yellow chairs and tables that had been used by all the children who have passed through the school in the last eighteen years. They had done remarkably well but were past their sell-by date, the legs not quite straight, the table tops marked, the chairs well-worn.

Zaan went shopping and she bought chairs and tables of every colour - except yellow - and everyone loves the rainbow effect in the classrooms.

It's a funny thing though, nobody thought it wasn't comfortable using the old chairs and tables until they tried out the new ones. Now they know what comfort really is.

Linda Bruce, has likewise volunteered her knowledge and skill to guide a class of primary school children to speak, read and write English with confidence. She is using the Let’s Read Do & Learn reading programme, a good curriculum, she says, for teaching a First Additional language.

The children have named their class, "The Very Clever English Class"

While acquiring competence in English is the primary objective of the lessons, Linda has the children’s well-being very much at heart and is nurturing emotional intelligence, encouraging the children to tell a friend when their behaviour hurts their feelings instead of saying something hurtful in return. She is also encouraging responsibility by giving the children tasks in the classroom and rotating leadership roles and fostering good listening skills and self discipline.

Linda taught the first lesson of “The Very Clever English Class” in January 2023 and is pleased with the progress the children have made to date.