What makes you happy, healthy and safe?
You’ll need
- Coloured pens or pencils
- Pens or pencils
- Craft materials (for example, tissue paper, pipe cleaners, stickers)
- A4 paper
Before you begin
- Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
- 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.
Planning and setting up this activity
- This is a drawing and colouring activity, but you can adapt it to use craft materials or building materials if that better suits your group.
- For Squirrels and Beavers, rights can be explained as the things all children need to grow up happy, healthy and safe.
- You can use the Scouts Cymru Rights Award booklet to support this activity.
- All the rights for young people are written on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
- You may wish to use this Song and Lyrics,to help your group learn about their rights.
Running this activity
- Gather everyone together.
- As a group, ask:
- What things make you feel happy?
- What things help you stay healthy?
- What things help keep you safe?
- Give each young person a piece of paper and some colouring pencils.
- Ask them to draw a picture showing what or who helps them feel happy, healthy, and safe.
- Once everyone has finished, you could display the drawings like an art gallery so everyone can see each other’s work. If it’s right for your group, invite young people to talk about their picture, what it means, how it makes them feel, and what they have learned.
Reflection
This activity was all about your rights and what you need to grow up happy, healthy, and safe. You talked together about what helps you feel this way and drew pictures to share your ideas.
Did other people draw things similar to you? How did that make you feel? Was there anything you forgot to add to your drawing that someone else included? You learned that these needs are part of children’s rights, written in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), and that all children have the right to feel happy, healthy, and safe.
Safety
All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.
You must run your activities in line with the Safeguarding Code of Conduct for Adults (Yellow Card) and report any concerns to the UK HQ Safeguarding Team.
To make this activity easier, you could give young people one question at a time to think about and draw before moving on to the next. For example, ask them to think about and draw what makes them happy first. Once everyone has finished, you can then ask them to think about and draw what helps keep them healthy. You can repeat this for what helps keep them safe. You could then reflect on the drawings together and see what things they have in common between the drawings.
Make it accessible
All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.
If you enjoyed this activity, you could try the next rights activity to continue your award.
Young people could choose how they want to do this activity; individually, as a whole group, using craft or building materials, or another form of creative expression.