Right to Play!

Our November 26th meeting started off with an enrolment ceremony for Hayley who had been away for our planned enrolment night. After this, our first activity was a brief discussion about what Right to Play is. Right to Play is a global organization that uses play, games and sports to educate and empower children. The organization was founded in 2000 by Johann Olav Koss, a 4-time Olympic gold medalist in Speed Skating. More information can be found on their website at http://www.righttoplay.com/. 
We then played two games from the Right to Play website - Run For Your Rights and Crossing the River, followed by an activity from the Equitas Play It Fair Toolkit, I Have the Right to... (#28).

• Run for Your Rights - The purpose of the game is to help girls become more familiar with some of their rights. Players stand in a circle. Each has a card with one of the Rights of the Child on it (3-5 girls have the same card). One player stands in the centre, she will try to 'steal' a place in the circle. The game leader calls out one of the Rights and everyone with that right runs to find a new place in the circle. The game leader can also call out 'Run for your Rights', which means all players move to find a new spot and "Learn your Rights", which means all players pass their Right card to the player on their right. 
• Crossing the River - The purpose of this game is to help girls recognize the challenges faced by children who have their rights violated. Divide girls into teams of 4-6 players and give each team a different number of sheets of paper. The teams then have to make their way from one end of the playing area to the other standing only on the paper. (Teams with fewer sheets will likely have more problems than those with more sheets)
• I Have the Right to... - The purpose of this game is practice teamwork and become acquainted with human rights and how we can ensure they are respected. The game is played similar to Romeo & Juliet. Girls are in pairs, one is the runner and one is the actor. Depending on what is called by the game leader, they act out 4 different human rights. The last pair to perform the action is out. Rights are the Right to Education, Right to Security, Right to Express Oneself, and Right to Rest.

Next, we had each Patrol make up their own game using a simple object - the Hollies created a tag game using two sticks as 'safe' bases, the Bluebells created a guessing game using an empty water bottle, and the Violet's created a catch game using a plastic bag.
Our last activity of the evening was the game "My Little Bird" from Tanzania. 

• My Lillte Bird - In this game, one player stands in front of the group and flaps her arms. She says "My little bird is lively, lively." Then quickly calls out the name of anything he wishes, for example, "Goats ... fly!" If the thing named can fly, the other players raise their arms in a flying motion. If the thing named cannot fly, the players remain still. Should a player's arms move at the wrong call, that player is out of the game.