We follow the South African CAPS curriculum to the letter. Around it we add three small programmes that fit the village we live in: an edible garden, a heritage choir, and a reading corner that runs on borrowed library cards.
These programmes are small, low-cost and stubborn. They are also the things our learners write about when, ten years later, somebody asks them to remember primary school.
Our 400 m² vegetable garden is a real garden, not a project. Spinach, beetroot, dry beans, butternut. Grade 5 owns Tuesday watering; Grade 6 owns Thursdays. Whatever is harvested goes into the NSNP pot the same week.
Last term our garden produced 38 kg of spinach and 22 kg of beetroot — enough to flavour eight weeks of NSNP meals.
Every Wednesday afternoon the whole school becomes a choir. We sing Setswana folk songs, traditional church harmonies and a quiet rotation of South African national heritage pieces — with claps, body percussion and one borrowed marimba.
Our choir performed at the Bojanala District Heritage Day concert in 2024 — the smallest school on the programme by a country mile.
Every classroom keeps a borrow-and-return book corner of about 80 books in Setswana, English and isiZulu. On Friday afternoons each child takes one book home for the weekend — "Read Aloud at Home" with a parent, granny or older sibling.
Our 2024 ANA-style internal benchmark showed Grade 3 home-language reading at 78 % (up from 61 % in 2022). Quietly, it is our proudest number.
A primary-school day in 2026 looks remarkably like one in 1996, and we are not embarrassed about that. Hover any node to see what is happening.
Mapaputle Primary