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Graduation marks the end of another year at Matjana Preschool. In March this year we held our graduation ceremony where our kids from 2021 were moving to Primary school late after COVID disruptions. This week we held another graduation party of a team which started in April this year.
We had fewer kids in 2022 than the other years as we started the year with 15 kids and ended up with 18 after doing a community drive for preschool children. Out of the 18 kids, only 3 were boys, something which we don’t think it has happened at Matjana before. Our teachers said they didn’t grouped kids according to gender which is something they would have done if they had about the same number of boys as girls. Teacher Precious said, “ I wish I would have tried the boys traditional dance during our graduation but with the number that we had it wouldn’t work. We tried it during practice but it didn’t work, at least if they were five”.
Nokphila is a 21 year old lady from the area. One of the, most interesting things about her is that she was one of Matjana students in 2007 and 2008. According to one of her teachers Ncobile, Nokphila was one of the sweetest kids. When asked what she remembered about her she said, “Nokphila was very quiet and a hardworking child. She spent two years at preschool because we didn’t know that she was 4 when she came for the first time”.When we asked one was the teachers what they had to say about Nokphila she said, “ Nokphila is the sweetest amongst us, I think. If you can ask at least 10 of our kids who is their favourite teacher, I’m sure they will say its teacher Nokphila”. She comes to school three days a week and our kids would always be asking us “where is Teacher Nokphila” during the days when she not coming to school.
One can say that it was a hard year for our three teacher because they were all new. Teacher Khetsiwe (who is our head teacher) started working at Matjana at the beginning of this year while Precious and Nokphila joined in later in the year, when Londi left to get married. One can imagine how it feels like to be in a school where you are all new.
However , we are pleased to see how hard they have worked despite being ‘new’. Precious who has worked as a sub teacher for 3 months and had been a school chairperson in the years 2015,2016 and 2020 said even though it was a hard year for them, she would use her experience for having worked at Matjana before. She said, “I would at times call Matjana former teachers (Swane) who is always willing to help. Swane is one of our former teachers who have come to our school more than three times this year to help us in one or two things. She also sent us some graduation activities e.g. poems, songs etc.
“We are glad that the 17th graduation was successful after a short planning time,” said Precious. Our teachers had not planned to do the graduation early this month. It was a last minute thought because we weren’t sure what will happened after transport workers had proposed for 2 days of national shutdown. Nokphila said “We were planning to have a graduation of the last day of school (as per government school calendar) which was suppose to be 22 December”.
Besides the graduation there are so many things which we had planned and didn’t managed to organise including a school trip and that will be on top of our list next year.
The day was packed with songs, dance moves, food and much more. Our kids didn’t seems to be excited as they were when we were making the preparations . Nokphila said, “I was a bit disappointed because the kids weren’t doing the dances as they would do them during rehearsals”. Our teachers believe that the kids were shy to perform in front of other people (siblings and parents).
Looking forward to 2023
As we say goodbye to the year 2022,we are in the process of planning for the year 2023. We can say that this was the shortest year we know so far and mainly because all our teachers we still trying to settle in. We are looking for forward to the year 2023 with more kids and lots of activities. Registration for 2023 kids ( who will be joined by our 4 year old) is ongoing and we are ready to start off the year.