Amuse: fun, educational holiday programme in July

Win a family hike worth R585!

You could be the lucky winner of a family ticket to the Hi-Tec Knysna Forest Family Hike, during the 2013 Pick n Pay Knysna Oyster Festival, worth R585!

The prize includes:

• Entry to the hike for 2 adults and up to 2 kids
• A goodie bag for each participant
• Breakfast
• Coffee and juice
• A Hi-Tec Dakota Fleece Top for each adult valued at R250

Three easy steps to enter:

1. Visit www.bkpublishing.blogspot.com.
2. Read the press release entitled 2013 Pick n Pay Knysna Oyster Festival programme full of new highlights posted on 20 May 2013.
3. Answer the following question: Name any one thing that older kids will enjoy at the 2013 Pick n Pay Oyster Festival.

Send your full name, contact details and answer to competition@bkpublishing.co.za or 082 814 1981 before midnight on 18 June 2013. The winner will be announced on 16 June 2013.*

*Terms and conditions apply.

Bestselling author Chris Bradford in Johannesburg

Penguin South Africa has organised an author talk by best selling international children’s author, Chris Bradford on Monday, 3 June at Novel Books in Bryanston, Johannesburg.

The talk will focus on his Young Samurai series (targeted at children aged 9 – 12), but his presentation will be fun for the whole family, including moms and dads. Don't miss this event!

BK Publishing at your school!

On Friday 17 May 2013, Director/Publisher Benoit Knox and new addition to the Supernova team Waldo Swart visited St Peter's Boys School in Johannesburg to give talks to grades 5  to 7 about publishing and Supernova magazine. The learners were very enthusiastic to hear what Mr Knox had to say, who was aided by a new, improved, super funky slideshow courtesy of Mr Swart's talents.

Below are a few photographs of the exciting morning of many past and many more to follow!

If you would like BK Publishing to visit your school to chat to the learners about Supernova magazine or publishing as a career option, please contact Benoit Knox at +27 12 342 5347 or email him at benoit@bkpublishing.co.za. Please note that we are based in Gauteng, so only schools in this region may apply.

Inkling: a very dairy milk tart recipe

Ingredients

Crust

1 packet (200g) tennis biscuits

75g (80 ml) butter or margarine

Filling

1,5 litres milk

50g (60ml) butter or margarine

4 eggs

200g (250ml) white sugar

70g (150ml) corn flour

70g (125ml) cake flour

Pinch of salt

5ml vanilla essence

Cinnamon

Utensils

Electric mixer

30 x 23cm tart or pie dish

Microwave (if you do not have a microwave you can do this on the stove)

Step 1: Make your crust

Crush your biscuits until they are fine and smooth. Microwave the butter or margarine until its melted. Mix the crushed biscuits with the melted butter or margarine, and layer your tart or pie dish with the mixture.

Step 2: Start your filling

Microwave the milk and the butter or margarine for more or less 15 minutes in an open 3,5 litre bowl at 100% power until it boils.

Step 3

Use a mixer, and beat the eggs and white sugar until it's spongy. Sift the corn flour, cake flour and salt together, and sift the mixture bit-by-bit over the spongy egg and white sugar mixture, while you beat it rapidly with the mixer. Lastly, add the vanilla to the mixture and beat everything together.

Step 4

Add the boiling milk mixture (Step 2) into the mixture above (Step 3), and mix together with the mixer.

Step 5

Microwave it open for between 10 and 12 minutes at 70% power. Remember to stir the mixture every few minutes.

Step 6

Add the mixture into your tart or pie dish and sift some cinnamon over it. Place it in your fridge. It will be ready when it has set.

Step 7

Spoil yourself with a slice of milk tart and some berry juice. Either hot or cold, a milk tart never gets old!

Good idea

Ask your mom or dad to help you with your milk tart. Substitute your tennis biscuits with digestive or ginger biscuits. For healthier milk tart, use low fat milk rather than full cream milk, and artificial sweetener rather than white sugar.

Bad idea

Never add the spongy egg mixture (Step 3) into the boiling milk. You will make scrambled eggs rather than a milk tart!

Words by Julia Hopkirk

Festival of Excellence in Dramatic Arts

Improving Education… the Power is In Your Hands

One entrepreneur has a vision for improving the nation’s pass rates by harnessing the power of technology and parental involvement

Salah ElBaba came to Cape Town for a holiday in 2003 and ended up marrying a local, moving here permanently and becoming a very successful tech entrepreneur.

Salah, whose exotic name comes from his Lebanese father, originates from London and started life as a partner in a very successful UK recruitment company where he remained for twenty years. His last two years there were spent developing an online reminder service for universities to help students keep track of tests and assignments; this experience was to come in handy shortly after he decided to visit South Africa on holiday.

“I originally planned on visiting Cape Town for two weeks, but ended up staying for six weeks, during which time I met my wife-to-be, Irene. I knew I wanted to marry her and live in Cape Town so I went back home to wrap things up and a month later was back in Cape Town. I proposed to her the day I landed and we were married a year later.”

Salah is someone who knows a good thing when he sees it. He’s also decisive enough to take hold of his dream and make it his own. “I wanted to make a difference in this beautiful country I had now made my new home, and I had an idea of a way to help schools communicate more effectively to parents using sms's.” In March 2004 he met Andre Roux and together they started SMSWEB, a company that now has more than 550 schools nationally using their service.

Parental involvement improves student performance

Many studies have shown the impact of parental involvement in learner pass rates. One study’s results indicated that school, family, and community partnership practices can significantly decrease chronic absenteeism, even after school level and prior rates of absenteeism are taken into account. In particular, communicating with families about attendance, celebrating good attendance with students and families, and connecting chronically absent students with community mentors measurably reduced students’ chronic absenteeism from one year to the next. Also, schools that conducted a greater total number of attendance-focused activities were more likely to decrease the percentage of students who missed twenty or more days of school each year. (http://www.adi.org/journal/fw04%5CSheldon%20&%20Epstein.pdf)

“We will send over 19 million SMS’s in 2013 and reach over a million parents,” says Salah. Parents receive messages from the school via SMS, email, social media or instant messaging, telling them about key events or important information pertaining to their child. Our schools tell us that “Parents love receiving these notifications and being on top of what’s happening. We filter our messages by grade, subject, gender, extra curriculum and even language so our messages are targeted and specific to each child. We’ve seen truancy reduced, school fees paid on time, as well as general discipline improve now that parents don’t have to rely on us sending a note home with the child,” says Salah

Salah recently announced the launch of his new product EduCals which allows parents to see their school’s calendar live on their phone, tablet or PC, updated in real time. “The logical next step in the evolution of our vision was for us to create an online calendar service that allows schools to add events like exams, tests, assignments, homework or sports days into the calendar, and allows parents to synchronise their child’s calendar with their phone/tablet/laptop/computer using MS-Outlook, Google Calendar, iCalendar (Apple), or any other calendar service around,” says Salah. “As a father of three I saw how much Irene battled with coordinating our diary with that of each child’s school curriculum, which led me to the idea of EduCal.”

“I can’t wait to have my children’s school calendars on my iPhone,” says entrepreneur and mother of two Sonja D. “I get pages of notes and events from each teacher and spend hours pouring over them trying to figure out where each child needs to be on what day and at what time. Balance that with my meetings and work load and you have a recipe for disaster, with kids being left waiting or appointments being missed.”

“Every time I ask my teenage son about homework and tests he says he’s done it or he has none,” says Sonja. “Now I get a reminder on my phone and make sure I take the time to sit with him and help him with anything he’s battling with, which will definitely improve his marks now and his career prospects later.”

EduCal integrates seamlessly with SMSWEB, giving schools a powerful way to reach out to parents to keep them in the loop with important events. It also reduces the amount of admin that goes into running a school, making it quicker, easier and cheaper for schools to communicate with parents.

“We’re going to take education in South Africa to the next level,” says Salah. “Eventually calendar reminders will also contain digital content that is aligned with the curriculum so parents will be able to open the course content and review the work with the child. It will also contain videos to online training resources, like Khan Academy, so parents will be able to actively participate and direct their child’s education without relying entirely on teachers to do so.”

South Africa has hundreds of thousands of children whose parents are not actively involved in their schooling. Eventually, EduCal will be able to fulfil the role of reminding them of homework, as well as providing course content digitally.

“Technology is the solution for the challenges education faces in South Africa, and those technologies have to take into account that not everyone uses smart phones, although that number is ever on the increase,” says Salah. “Parents don’t need to have a smart phone to receive these reminders, but can elect to receive them via whichever channel suits them best be it SMS, instant messaging like BBM, Mxit, WeChat or viaEemail or Social Media. We’re blown away by the feedback we’ve received from principals, teachers and parents alike. We set out to make a difference in South Africa and we can happily say that we are doing just that, one pupil at a time.”

Connect with Salah ElBaba on:

Call (021) 914 4681 or 0861 767 932
E-mail info@smsweb.co.za
SMSWeb´s official site
EduCal’s official site
LinkedIn profile

Article by Dylan Kohlstädt: Shift ONE