I developed a love for reading at a very young age. This was because I was privileged enough to have parents who took me to the library and who always read me storybooks before I could read for myself. It gave me a love for reading that I still have today.
We know that not everyone has access to a library. But, Fundza makes sure we include children’s stories as part of our mobi library on the fundza.mobi site. Children are the future; if we don’t start reading with and to them it can have negative effects later on. Our children’s story section caters for children between the ages of 3 to 12 years. We have level 1 children’s stories that can be read by an older sibling to their younger brother or sister, or a parent to their child. We have level 5 stories for 12 year olds and more advanced readers too.
Our stories are not just in English, but we have stories in isiXhosa, isiZulu and Afrikaans. We get our stories from various creative commons or public domain sites such as Storyberries, Book Dash and African Storybook Initiative.
I wrote a few of my own stories for FunDza and these were illustrated by my brothers. The stories I wrote dealt with topics such as kindness, bullying, friendship and family. Writing my own stories is something that brought a great delight to me, as well as seeing the impact that these have on readers.
We are now translating some of the openly-licensed stories into Sesotho, thanks to our in-house writer/editor, Refilwehape Mofokeng. The process has been exciting! It is always amazing being able to contribute or to be a part of putting smiles on the faces of our young readers knowing that they are able to read a story in their own home language.
FunDza looks forward to entertaining more young readers in the future. Reading for enjoyment is our absolute goal and it starts at the age of three.