MyJHB

Stuff from Johannesburg

Can You Spell the Word That Decided This Joburg Spelling Bee Competition?

Advertorial:
Can You Spell the Word That Decided This Joburg Spelling Bee Competition?:

Refiloe Hlophe from Watershed Technical School competed in this year’s Windybrow Arts Centre Spelling Bee competition on Saturday. Refiloe was one of the top three learners.

The Windybrow Arts Centre in Hillbrow, Johannesburg was a hive of activity on Saturday where dozens of learners from inner-city schools competed in the 2nd annual Spelling Bee competition.

This year’s event was organised by the Windybrow Arts Centre and the non-government organisation, Camp I Am.

“This competition is about creating a fun and exciting environment, but is also aimed at getting children to read more,” said Kai Crooks-Chissano, executive director of Camp I Am.

Chissano worked with partners from other organisations and the Windybrow Arts Centre to craft a challenging word list from the Department of Basic Education’s CAPS curriculum. The participating learners had a list of over 600 words to study in preparation for this year’s Spelling Bee.

Last year’s inaugural competition only had grade 7s participating, but this year was open to learners from grades 7 to 9.

The Spelling Bee forms is of the Windybrow Arts Centre’s Literacy and Homework Support Programme, which equips local youth with reading and writing skills.

This follows a 2021 study by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) that revealed troubling statistics showing that more than 80% of grade 4 learners in South Africa cannot read for meaning.

Lordwick Pako, the Windybrow’s librarian, told GroundUp “We know we have challenges with literacy in South Africa, so our aim is to build a literate society which would result in people having access to more information and therefore making better decisions.”

The Spelling Bee consisted of four rounds. Learners who spelt words incorrectly were eliminated in each round. Eventually only three contestants remained battling it out for the top spot.

At the end of the competition, Onthloletse Dimema from St Enda’s Secondary School in Braamfontein came out victorious after correctly spelling the word “Plateau” much to the delight of her English teacher who was in the audience.

Onthloletse Dimema from St Enda’s Secondary School in Braamfontein won the top spot after correctly spelling the word “Plateau” on Saturday.

“I really enjoyed the competition. It was so much fun even though I was nervous at the start. I love reading and writing, and English is my favourite subject, so I was familiar with a lot of the words we were asked to spell,” said Onthloletse. She won a R1,000 mall voucher as well as some books and a scrabble board game.

“We don’t have that many good news stories coming out of Johannesburg’s inner-city but I think this is one definitely is one,” said Gerard Bester, head of the Windybrow Arts Centre.

© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.

Read More at GroundUp

– MyZA

CLICK HERE to submit your news to www.MyPR.co.za.

Click here to submit your South African News – free.

Prepaid Meters: Straton Prepaid

Category: Tag: , , , , , ,

Top Star Drive-In: The Cinema on the Mountain of Gold

The Ferreira Dump began growing in the late 1800s, composed of the crushed rock and chemical residue left over after early, inefficient mining processes had extracted as much gold as the technology of the time allowed. By the 1960s, it was a flat-topped, man-made mesa overlooking the city. In a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, the surface was tarred and the Top Star Drive-In was opened. It quickly became a South African institution. Its appeal was not just the movies, but the unparalleled view: as the sun set, the massive white screen would flicker to life against a backdrop of the glowing skyscrapers of the Central Business District, separated from the viewer only by the elevated M2 highway.

In the decades before television arrived in South Africa (1976), the Top Star was a primary social hub. It was a democratic space in an undemocratic time; while the city below was strictly segregated, the “car” served as a private bubble that allowed a degree of social freedom not found in traditional theaters. For many Johannesburgers, the Top Star was a site of nostalgic rites of passage—first dates, family outings where children were piled into the back of station wagons with blankets and flasks of tea, and the Saturday “car market” where the parking lot transformed into a sprawling hub for buying and selling second-hand vehicles.