Exploring ways to express ourselves...

Over the past two sessions, we have been working around the concept of freedom of expression and participation. As few children ended up joining these sessions due to exams and temperamental weather, it was an opportunity at times for FyA’s pedagogues and cefistas to offer one to one activities.

So we launched our one-before-last session with a brief but somewhat serious discussion around the right to freedom of opinion and expression, namely the importance of holding personal and independent opinions, as well as the different ways to impart these and receive other people’s ideas.

We then moved on to more entertaining stuff and divided into two teams. The aim was to communicate ideas and expressions differently with one group acting these out and the other singing and playing guitar.

After a good 20mn preparation, the teams reverted back to the tent for the show to start. The acting part was quite cute, though it was not entirely clear that the rest of the kids really got the essence of what the actual message was. ;-0 Things however were much clearer with our newborn musicians who offered an entertaining repertoire of songs, with a couple even leading on guitar! As the energy and excitement reached its peak, the little performing band’s song grew to the whole group breaking into quitenian slang (which was quite hilarious!) to then end in an interesting range of mimicked languages (also worth a listen!)- all this of course to clapping hands and hopping and skipping bodies...a creative set of expressions it was indeed!

After this little jam session, we asked the kids whether they enjoyed that day’s activities, which they most preferred over the past month and how they would like the future encuentros to be. With this information successfully collected, we began sketching a first draft of articles for Cuéntamelo Todo’s Declaration. We have to admit this has been in the pipeline for a while, has been touched upon on many occasions with the kids but seems somehow to be growing very organically each time and certainly unwilling to stop!

The following session, closely linked to the previous theme, was on participation and was led by our cefista star, Henry, also known as our “Principito”. Henry, who had a drastic cold that day, began by underlying the fact that daily we take part in many activities within and beyond home, school, etc. and that, as part of the Cuéntamelo Todo group, the kids could for example choose to organise in an Assembly and discuss matters from these different participatory spaces that affect them directly. The aim of the discussion was to encourage our little citizens to understand there are various ways of participating (looking, listening, speaking, and voting), voice their viewpoints and to take these on board. To do so, Henry used as a starting point Cuéntamelo Todo’s Declaration of Rights draft which (if you please) had been copied out onto an old-style looking parchment paper!

The kids gathered on the stairs to oversee the articles and decide whether, as a group, they agreed or not with these. Technically speaking, there was no voting; however a few consensual amendments were made, removing some articles and creating new ones. Interestingly enough, after the rights’ part was finished, the discussion naturally went on to responsibilities. So Henry handed out another parchment type paper, to become the Declaration of Responsibilities, where the kids started matching obligations to the rights they had elected in the first Declaration.

With Cuéntamelo Todo’s first Assembly being drawn to a close, Christian, one of our pedagogues, suggested the kids selected a book (we always have a few available for those who like to browse at the beginning & end of sessions), and together with a grown-up tried to pinpoint some of the rights and obligations we had just covered together.

This exercise turned out to be a real success with the kids highlighting text elements which related to their Declarations.

The day ended softly with each returning their elected book and hugging the team goodbye.