What’s the big idea?

The Day of the African Child marks the day when, in 1976, thousands of black school children in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest about the poor quality of their education. It is also used to draw attention to African children today and the theme for 2008 is child participation.

Assembly ideas

Use the assembly to teach pupils about the lives of African children. Resources produced by the Send a Cow charity should help and can be found on their Cowfiles website.

BBC Newsround also has a great introductory guide that you could add to by drawing on personal accounts of African children, individual stories can be found in the Press Packs section of the website.

However, given this year’s theme, you could focus on the right of African children to participate in the development of their continent. Plan, a child-centred community development organisation, has a good teaching resources website. If you search its resource centre for “child participation”, you can access a good range of multimedia resources. Alternatively, you could adapt the Right to Participate lesson plan available from the Learning Africa website.

Help, I don’t have enough time to prepare

Use the ready made resources available at: www.cowfiles.comafrican-info

Where can I go for more information?

www.learningafrica.org.ukdownloadsactivity_governance_participate.pdf; www.plan-edresources.org; http:news.bbc.co.ukcbbcnewshispecials2005africadefault.stm

Next Week: June 23-27 Child Safety Week.