A generous donation of beautiful children’s clothes backed up by funding to cover workshops in the first two quarters of this year, led to a series of immensely popular reading workshops. This theme will eventually be part of our FUN (Yellow)Toolbox and the children just loved it!
The clothes themselves, plus a selection of second-hand non-fiction books on aspects of design, gave inspiration. The books are listed at the end of this article, and now form part of the permanent CBN resource library. Non-fiction is an increasingly important aspect of reading for the older children in CBN’s range (12-years-old) and they enjoy cross-referencing and reading about subjects that interest them. The books included everything from car design to ethnic jewelry – but possibly the most popular was one on shoes, which caused great discussion and excited comment – and led to some unusual, and very creative designs.
Fiction was not neglected, with specially written stories on fashion, image and self-presentation that were distributed to be read while the story was performed (and taken home later, as were the designs).
This proved to be one of our most popular themes yet, generating much discussion of – for example Goths versus skater-boys and the disadvantages as opposed to the fashion impact of very high heels! Both boys and girls were completely absorbed and incidentally reading without even thinking about it.
We held a major workshop at Enlighten Educational Trust – all the bells and whistles, including our musician board member Terry Takura and visiting New York author Kate Hosford, who read from her book of poetry ‘songbirds dream of Singing’. The new CBN song was enthusiastically premiered as well!
Further smaller workshops have been held at Okkie Smuts and De Bron Primary schools – with requests for more on the same theme. It was a huge success!
Numbers of workshops: 6
Numbers of children Approximately 120
Many pictures!
