The books

The books
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned having been away for the weekend to write books. I’ve been meaning to mention these books here before, and now I think that now is finally the time! It’s a long post, so get yourself a cup of tea, why don’t you?

The books are called the Kagiso Readers, and are a graded series of 28 reading books for grades 1, 2 and 3, published by Maskew Miller Longman. I co-wrote and illustrated them over a period starting in 2001, when I was very involved in writing and illustrating educational materials. Now the Kagiso team is starting to work on extending the series in grades 4 – 6.

What makes the Kagiso Readers special is that our writing team wrote each book simultaneously in three languages, using an incremental list of vocabulary, consolodated by each subsequent book. The series has now been versioned in 11 languages. The fact that all the languages are so closely equivalent makes them an invaluable resource in a multilingual classroom, which is a very common reality in South Africa.

You can see the list of languages in the pic below.

One of our writing team members, Barbara Coombe, is using the books on a daily basis, going into classrooms all over South Africa and training teachers in their use. She’s started a non-profit organisation called Literacy for All, and doing her darnest to realise her dream of getting South African children literate, even though she’s now 70 years old! Read more about Literacy for All here.

Now for the fun part. I’m going to give you a tour through my favourite book in the series: Zola’s Haircut.

Hope you enjoyed that! I’m immensely proud of this work, and also of the work done by Literacy for All. I believe that these books serve our country well and will, in a small way, contribute to making it a better place.