Good Health Begins at Home: A Guide for Literacy Tutors

This guide, published by the adult literacy NGO, Operation Upgrade, helps parents and community members become better home health providers. Working with the guide, educators can show learners how to develop good health for themselves and their families and how to treat common illnesses. It is available in Zulu and English and can be downloaded in high-resolution and low-resolution versions. Good Health Begins at Home is a participatory health-literacy guide with a picture kit that teaches reading and writing skills and health management through discussions based on learner's experiences and through knowledge shared by the educator with the learners.

The guide uses two teaching approaches: the FAMA approach which asks people to associate the facts in the pictures with their meaning for them as people, and the language experience approach.

The publication is a collaborative project of the Thrasher Research Fund, Laubach Literacy and Operation Upgrade of South Africa. The material was tested in Operation Upgrade adult literacy workshops.

Topics covered include:

• Learn how to help your family have good health ;
• Clean bodies and hands prevent germs from spreading;
• Healthy families need good nutrition;
• Immunisation helps protect families from disease; and
• Healthy families can treat and prevent sickness.