Children rights - new ways to learn more about yourself

My story for today is again related with the activities that I am doing with Ivi at the ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ ΔΙΑΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΙΚΗΣ ΕΚΠΑΙΔΕΥΣΗΣ ΣΑΠΩΝ in Sapes. Our new aim is to spread as much information as possible about children rights to the pupils.

The first Question that we got from the kids was: what are the children rights and how are they different from human rights? Well, the answer it’s a very simple one:

Children's rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to minors. Children's rights includes their right to association with both parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for physical protection, food, universal state-paid education, health care, and criminal laws appropriate for the age and development of the child, equal protection of the child's civil rights, and freedom from discrimination on the basis of the child's race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, color, ethnicity, or other characteristics. Interpretations of children's rights range from allowing children the capacity for autonomous action to the enforcement of children being physically, mentally and emotionally free from abuse. Other definitions include the rights to care and nurturing.

Basically, that’s a small introduction of the topic. During two days we organized meetings with 4 groups of pupils in a less formal environment. First we started with videos, to help the kids to understand more about the topic itself. Because as we noticed most of the kids from the school they don’t really know what that topic represents, not having even basic information about it.

After the videos were watched we started to do the talks about it. We discussed about the video about what new they took from it and what was old information for them. We discussed about the current situation in Greece and in their school, the main problem that was raised by the kids was the lack of informative sources for them as pupils the lack of computers, laboratories and civic education. We also started to make a list with all the children rights that they think that are important for every child to have.

At the end of each meeting, all the pupils had to draw anything that would be related to the child rights and that will be posted on the school wall so other pupil will learn also from it!

As we did a lot of talks time for finishing their draws we did not have enough, so next week they will have to finish with what they started. And I will be able to post more materials regarding their work. Please follow up for the updates.