Influences: Adverts and Media

Purpose of activity: To understand how adverts affect us. Advertisements are part of the environment and they can reflect the values of our society and create peer pressure.

Life skills: Critical thinking, creative thinking 

Important points: People who smoke cigarettes put their own and others health at risk. Advertisements for cigarettes try to influence people to start smoking and to buy cigarettes.

Materials: Three adverts for smoking (and/or other adverts in the environment which the children may see often). You can use the illustrations below but it is better to cut out local ones from magazines or newspapers or go on the streets to look at billboards, where appropriate.  

Steps

1. Ask the group what messages are being given by each advertisement. How does the advertisement try to affect us? For example: By being colourful and eye catching; by linking a good life with the product; by using sexy image; or by using words that make us laugh or catch us by surprise
2. Discuss whether these advertisements tell the truth.
3. Ask the children to describe or show a poster advert s/he likes very much and say why.
4. Ask children what other kinds of adverts they hear or see (radio, TV, magazines).
5. Discuss why we like or dislike advertisements and how they affect the way people think.
6. In pairs or groups, ask children to act out a role-play in which one child has seen an advertisement for something that s/he wants to have or to do. S/he has to try to convince the group and the others in the group have to change his or her mind. Allow 10 minutes and then the pair or group have to declare the outcome. 

Final discussion:

Ask the group to remember how the discussion developed. Ask the children if they have been affected by an advertisement. Which advert? Should we be careful of adverts? (Think about how we gain or lose from having or doing what is advertised.)

Rights and Responsibilities

Purpose of activity:
To share ideas about children's rights and responsibilities
To discuss how to ask closer to achieving their rights
Life skills: Critical thinking, creative thinking

Important points: Before the session, find out about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the laws on children's rights in the country. 

Materials

Pieces of paper large enough to make a life-size drawing of a child
Marker pens or crayons
Stickers (optional)
Steps:

Explain that this activity explores children's rights and responsibilities.
Rights: what children should have (food, shelter, safe water, health care play etc.) and Responsibilities: what children should do (respect others' rights, help one another etc.)
Ask a volunteer to lie down on the large piece of paper on the floor and draw the outline of their body shape.
Ask all the children to sit around the body drawing. Explain that the body drawing will become a child's rights and responsibilities.
Children brainstorm all the rights they think children should have. The educator writes all these suggestions inside the ‘body’ using a pen in one colour.
Children are then asked to list the responsibilities they have. To help them, show them that many rights have a corresponding responsibility, for example: A right to speak and a responsibility to listen.
Tell the children about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and your country's laws.
You can have a break here
Read through all the rights that the children listed inside the body.
Ask each child to vote for the three rights that are most important to them. Children can make three dots beside three different rights using a pen in a different colour, or if possible, give each child three stickers. If the children are not literate you can create symbols for different rights. Make sure the children can easily identify what the symbols represent. Then children tell the educator which rights they want to vote for and the educator shows them where to put their mark or sticker.
Select the three rights with the most votes and discuss how this right can be realised, for example: What needs to happen for children to ask the right to protection from violence?
Draw a thin line from each of these three rights. On a card outside the body, write children’s ideas about how to achieve this right.

Follow up: Encourage the children to work together to develop and implement an action plan to improve their rights

Case study

In India, children in a project formed a Child Rights Club. The children were interviewed by the media about their rights at the launch of the club. Here are some of the replies…
I was not allowed to play because I am a girl.
My mother does not send my sister to school, but she sends me. [ a boy]
A right to live a proper life is important because it is only after having this right that we can ask for the other rights. For example, if a girl does not even have the right to live, then what will she do with the other rights?
Because I was not educated, a vegetable seller cheated me.
The police beat me up and put me in an observation home. I wish I could live freely and safely. I hope the police will not beat me in future.