The author defends the claim, based on her experience as a teacher in the Foundation Phase as well as on her experience as the educator of student teachers in this Phase, that a specially constructed intervention programme will improve Grade 1's learning in several key areas. She firstly show that such a programme is required, given the current achievement levels of Foundation Phase learner's assessment results in South Africa, and then report on the results of an experiment based on her survey of literature. The results of the experiment show that the intervention programme indeed resulted in improvement of learning according to the results of a standardized test.