Shapes and colours

Before you begin 

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers. 

Setting up this activity 

• Cut out different colour shapes. Only one colour should be used per shape. Aim to have at least 3 or 4 different coloured shapes.  

 

Try the activity

1. Explain to everyone that you’re going to be learning about how everyone’s different identities and things that make them come together and result in an experience or life that is unique to them.
2. Decide as a group what each of the coloured shapes will represent. You should try to use “I am” statements rather than “I have” statements. For example, your group may decide that blue circles represent the statement “I am a sibling”, red triangles represent “I am a football player”, and yellow hearts represent “I am right-handed.” In older sections, your group may decide the identities they want to represent with the coloured shapes are more personal and may choose identities relating to religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class and more.
3. Everyone will take the coloured shapes that represent something about themselves as decided earlier by the group. It’s important no one takes a coloured shape that represents something that does not relate to them. Try to make sure that everyone doesn't end up taking the same combination of shapes.
4. Everyone will stick the various shapes onto their white background however they wish.
5. Once everyone has done this, you should come back together as a group and share your visual representation of your identities.
6. Discuss as a group how everyone has a different picture. Even people who had the same coloured shapes will have different pictures as they will have stuck the shapes in different places. Everyone’s picture (life) is unique not just because everyone has their own identities (coloured shapes), but everyone has different experiences relating to their identities and how they interact with each other (shape placement).
7. Talk about specific examples of this within your group. People who are siblings may be elder or younger siblings. People who are footballer players and siblings, do they play football with their siblings at home? This shows young people that even if someone has the same identities as you, their experiences are still unique, and they may have multiple identities interacting that result in an experience that looks different to yours.
8. In older sections, Scouts and above, you should now link this activity to discrimination and introduce the term “intersectionality”. Some people experience discrimination due to their identities, this may include racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia and more. Some people experience multiple types of discrimination, sometimes at the same time. Intersectionality is a way of thinking about power, privilege and discrimination that considers a person’s combination of social identities (gender, race, sexuality, class, eg.) rather than considering each identity separately.