The Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin, declared: “Colour! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.” He mixed the pigments on his palette to reflect his reactions to the world around him. His involvement with colour had begun like every other child…in a world of greyscale. For the first months, a newborn sees in black and white, growing in its ability to distinguish between hues. Thembelihle Mkhwanazi, leader of The Domino Foundation’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) team, spoke of how colour recognition plays a role far more critical than just growing Gauguin’s “language of dreams”: “Colour recognition is a critical step in a toddler’s cognitive development, helping with language skills, effective communication and understanding. They also need to learn about shapes so they can organise the world around them. Then, dealing with the alphabet and numbers becomes so much easier”.
Thembelihle’s field workers are partnering with a new group of 32 ECD centres, many of which are inadequately resourced to fully and effectively stimulate their pre-schoolers in basic early-years development. “Our programme comes alongside the educators to equip them with training and material assistance so that they are able to make sure the little people leave their centres soundly school-ready”. The ECD team has samples of an excellent set of posters it has given to centres before. With new partnering centres coming on board, Thembelihle is looking for a sponsor to help her programme produce 30 sets of laminated posters about the alphabet, colours, shapes and numbers.
She can be contacted at ecd @ domino.org.za or 013 110 0730.
