The Rights of the Child Pyramid   

Miss Rossella Sansone, Italian teacher did this activity in her classes 2 D and 1 G for Comenius Partnership as she wanted her students to understand the Rights of the Children properly and in an active way.

To talk about this topic she started from fundamental needs of humanity, those needs which are essential for our psychological and physical health. From the discussion has come out that for every fundamental need there is a right of man to be satisfied.

On this basis the classes decided to realize a pyramid of the rights; each student pasted on one side of a box (ex. shoe box) a picture that represented one right

(ex. right to education, to play, to health etc)  and on the other side some sentences to comment the chosen picture. Pictures were collected from newspapers, magazines or teaching aids or found on the Internet. 

The activity has been done either individually or in small groups, each of whom had the task of a box.

After covering all the boxes, the students built a pyramid  set the most important rights/needs as first ones and then gradually to the least important ones.

In order to reinforce the concept of Right, the classes watched two films:

• “Iqbal”
• “All the invisible children”

We have also read a Unicef book "This is my life", a collection of life experiences of boys and girls  who live in poor snd difficult areas of the five continents.

The students have tried to find out the neglected rights and unsatisfied need both in the films and in the book.

After this step they procedeed to remove the box corresponding to the neglected right.

What was the result of this experiment? We could see that when we gradually removed the boxes of fundamental rights, the pyramid collapsed.

This showed us how important the rights are.