San Francique Early Childhood Care Education Case Study

SCHOOL CONTEXT

The San Francique Hindu School is joined together with the San Francique Early Childhood Care Education (ECCE) Centre and has been in operation since 25th June 1973. The school is located on the left hand side of the San Francique main road. The school is securely fenced around with wire and has two entrance and exit points but for security reasons, only the front one is used. The school consists of one main building where the classes, office, staffroom, library, computer lab, reading area, stage and the ECCE classes are located. The left hand side of the main building has the canteen and the basket ball court yard. At the back left hand side has the school washroom areas. There is also a CAC stock room in progress at the back

The class teachers attempt to work with a structured timetable but sometimes have to change their plans to suit the needs and moods of the students. It also depending on the amount of content that needs to be covered in any given subject area. The class timetables are structured in a way to facilitate at least 5-6 lessons per day as well as their extracurricular activities which are scheduled into their timetable. Their extracurricular activities include Baal Vikaas, Choutal, Sports day, Scout, Agri- Science competition and any other board activities. Some of the teaching strategies teachers used include writing on the board, visual representation, explaining, examples, questioning, prompting, trial and error, repetition, group work, peer teaching, individual explanation (if needed), and asking who understands; ensuring that all students understand what was taught. Students’ work is often display in all classes on the wall or on the blackboards separating their classrooms. This is done as a form of motivation so that the students would be encouraged to do their work so that it will be displayed. Some resources used by teachers are black/white board, charts, multimedia (for reading or videos), books, and simple

Some of the strengths that can be seen in this school include: teachers cooperation, parents involvement, small numbers and the homework centre. During our visit there, we can clearly see that all of the teachers work closely with each other to ensure that everything goes well for their students. This ensures that all of the students are well taken care of and properly monitor at all times. If one teacher steps out of their classroom, the others always “look after” their class as well. Parents are also well involved in the school as the principal told us; they have a large attendance for PTA meetings. Parents’ interest can also be seen when the parents come before the school is dismissed and are interested in meeting the teachers to find out how their children are progressing. According to Henderson and Berla (1994), “Students with parents who are involved in their school tend to have fewer behavioural problems and better academic performance, and are more likely to complete high school than students whose parents are not involved in their school.” “Involvement allows parents to monitor school and classroom activities, and to coordinate their efforts with teachers to encourage acceptable classroom behaviour and ensure that the child completes schoolwork” (Hill and Taylor, 2004). Therefore research shows that the more involved parents are with their children’s education, the better they would do, in academics and behaviour.