In honour of our 20 year partnership, here is the Footprints story, as told by Shirley.
Wendy was living in Johannesburg in 2002 and I lived in Hermanus.
We both had young families, with children aged 10 and under. We had been homeschooling for a couple of years, using American literature-based homeschool curricula. These were excellent, but we also wanted our children to learn about South Africa through stories.
Wendy had her 4th child in March 2002 and I had my third in June that same year. I decided that after my baby was born, I was going to spend a lot of time cuddled up with my newborn and read South African stories to my step-daughter, whom I was homeschooling at the time, instead of following another American social studies curriculum.
I had a list of South African historical fiction and started sourcing these stories through the library and inter-library loans system.
As we read them, I decided to start recording the lessons we did together, based on those stories, so that I wouldn’t have to do all the ‘homework’ and research again with my three younger children. It also crossed my mind that if I needed these lessons, then other South African homeschoolers would probably be interested too. My idea was to create a product I could sell, as I needed an income!
Then Wendy posted on a homeschooling egroup that she was starting to piece together a South African curriculum. She had also been sourcing good South African stories that could be used in a literature-based curriculum. She had found a printing company that could reprint out of print books and she had researched how to go about paying royalties to the copyright owners.
I decided to email her and tell her what I was doing as we seemed to have the same goal.
Incredibly, I discovered that Wendy’s parents-in-law also live in Hermanus and she was bringing her children to visit them, while she and her husband went house-hunting in Cape Town as they were moving at the end of that year. We met face-to-face for the first time and from then on our collaboration began.
Everything we did was shared via email each night after 7pm as that was when dialing up to connect to the internet via Telkom was cheaper. We’d swap word documents, edit and add our own ideas to them and then mail them back to one another the next night.
Finally, we had a draft copy ready to print, we start advertising and homeschoolers started placing orders. We printed 20 sets of the Footprints On Our Land – South Africa’s Heritage package in our first print run and we started our business with some payments for pre-orders and a portion of our grocery budgets that month!
During this time of searching for suitable stories for Footprints, we had discovered a wealth of South African picture books and since we both had little children, we created Little Footprints and then we created the sequel to our original Footprints On Our Land programme for young teens, which is Footprints into the 21st Century (now discontinued and replaced by Footprints – The Last Century) . In 2020, we launched Voetspore 1- Die Vroeë Jare, our wildly popular Afrikaans homeschool curriculum for South African homeschoolers and in 2022, the sequel, Voetspore 2 – Die Laaste Eeu and Natuurskattejag 2, followed by Barefoot Days and Kaalvoetpret in 2023].
In 2023, we also discontinued Footprints On Our Land – South Africa’s Heritage and replaced it with an updated edition called Footprints – The Early Years.
Our little business was built on mutual trust and faith, with never a legal document signed between us. We think it is miraculous that two strangers could become business partners so successfully and then grow to be good friends too.
Although we offer niche products that serve a small portion of the South African homeschool community, Footprints has been an immense blessing to our families.
It has also been most satisfying to see how so many families (read our customer reviews) have enjoyed learning from the enriching stories, by top South African authors, that we have been able to provide and now, as we hoped, when we chose the name, they are leaving their footprints on our land!
Watch this quick video demo of our South African homeschooling curricula
Below is a 4 minute video overview of our Footprints products. On our YouTube channel there are also video demos of each product individually which shows more detail.
