By StYLE Reporter
Newly-established primary education institution Trinity Christian Junior School has decided to embrace Christian education in a bid to become a leading Christian school in the country and the region in the next few years.
Based in Harare’s Zimre Park suburb, the primary school which offers classes from early childhood development (ECD) up to Grade 7, started operating late last year.
And with an enrolment of close 100 students, the school has been conducting online lessons, multimedia lessons on WhatsApp and also introduced the Google Classroom learning platform since the beginning of the year.
“Our focus is to provide affordable and quality education to learners. We are also putting a lot of emphasis on Christian education, the idea being to develop the moral aspect of the child,” school head Peter Ngundu said.
“We have noted with concern that our new curriculum though it has a lot of moral education especially in terms of heritage, there are a lot of areas that have been left out, especially moulding the child’s Christian values because the new curriculum is now giving a lot of focus in all other religions.
“So, Zimbabwe being a Christian nation we need to create much room for Christians. In Christian education we are looking at imparting Christian values.
“We are not here to be preaching or reading the Bible or exercising spirituality for our children, but we are there to be imparting Christian values so that at the end our children are well rounded in all aspects, physical, emotional, and social,” Ngundu said.
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There was an uproar from the Christian community when the new curriculum was introduced in 2017 amid claims that is sought to remove the teaching of Christianity and replace it with Islam and other religions.
Like every other school in the country Trinity Christian Junior School offers the Ministry of Primary Education Curriculum, but looks to also improve areas of weakness in the curriculum.
“We have new technical subjects like Visual Performing Arts, Physical Education, Mass Displays and ICTs; and the approach we have taken is to engage specialist teachers for those areas. We are broadening our curriculum by including other areas such a foreign languages and Christian education, those are additional subjects we are putting in place to beef up our prospectus.
“As a school we are taking a branded approach where we are integrating ICTs into education especially now that we have the Covid-19 epidemic. We have integrated digital technologies into our education systems and these include Google Classrooms. We are also using WhatsApp which is more affordable and accessible to most of our learners, and we are also developing an online platform where we would provide lessons to our learners, which means when our learners leave school they don’t stop learning,” Ngundu said.
In terms of sports, the school provides diverse sports mostly indoor games such as darts, chess and table tennis as well as outdoor games such as swimming, cricket and hockey.
Ngundu spoke about the vision for Trinity Christian Junior School.
“We want to become a leading Christian school in Zimbabwe and the region within the next five years. In five years we should set up state-of-the-art infrastructure. We are working with the local authority to get a bigger piece of land to set up infrastructure for the school,” he said.
“We are looking at impacting Zimbabwe and the world so our goal as a school is to impact the world one child one learner at a time, that’s why we are emphasising on the aspect of values. We also have a high school in line if we acquire a big piece of land.”
