We are delighted to announce the winners of the NRC Readathon!

From 15 September to 30 October 2021, FunDza ran a fun Readathon in partnership with the National Education Collaboration Trust’s National Reading Coalition. Find out more about the project here.

The NRC Readathon was conducted as a closed course on the fundza.mobi site. This meant that it wasn’t open to all the standard FunDza readers – rather participants needed to know about the course and have access to the course code, so that they could enter it.

This is because the Readathon was only open to learners in grades 7, 8 and 9. Participants had to register and then answer questions on three short stories, with prizes for the top three scorers of the quizzes.

We were delighted to have over 250 learners completing the course, which took place mainly during the school holidays.

The three top scorers were Angel Oyama Dunusela (grade 7, from Jongintaba Senior Primary School,  Eastern Cape), Ombesa Shugu (grade 7, from Kuswag Primary School, Eastern Cape) and Tebogo Makoa (grade 9 from Mmamatli Combined School, Mpumalanga.)

All three were delighted to find out that they had won R500 in cash!

Then there was a prize for the school that had the highest number of learners who had completed the course. This went to Sunrise View Secondary School in the North West. They have won a box of books and T-shirts from FunDza.

In correspondence with the school, we learnt just why this school had done so well. Their English teacher – and their subject adviser – had participated with the learners in a WhatsApp group during the holidays where they encouraged learners to complete, and celebrated those who did. They sent us screenshots of some of the conversations, as well as a photograph of the happy class who did the course. It was really interesting for us at FunDza to see how teacher – and departmental – participation and enthusiasm had worked to get learners involved and committed.

We would like to thank the NECT and the NRC for this opportunity, and we are very pleased to see how this pilot worked. It demonstrated that hosting a ‘closed’ course competition is viable.  We would love to expand this in the future to run it over a longer period and also to extend marketing reach to schools and departmental officials.