Refugee Week June 17-23

It's Refugee Week soon and I thought I'd post a lesson plan I've been using with my Y5 and 6 pupils. 

I began by asking the children if they knew what a refugee was, then gave out copies of the Elise Gravel cartoon about refugees. This explains very clearly and simply why some people have to leave their home country and move to another place.

Then I played six very short YouTube videos, leaving time after each one for the children to answer some questions (detailed below). The videos are very sad to begin with and I wouldn't use them with a lower Year than 5. They also include a lot of subtitles, so if you have children in your class who find fast reading tricky, make sure you have someone sitting with them who will read the text for them.

Then I gave out photographs of child refugee faces and asked everyone to pick a face and focus on it. That was who they were going to be writing their poem about.

Click here for some beautiful and striking photographs of child refugee faces

For a warm-up, I asked them to think of things which were fragile or easily crushed (glass, bird's eggs, chicken bones etc). Then I asked them to list as many negative emotions as they could think of. Then I asked them to imagine a great big space with something very small in the middle of it, for instance to imagine they were in a hot air balloon flying low over a beach, what kind of tiny objects might they see stranded there? If they were flying over the sea, what small items might be adrift on the waves?

Finally I gave out the templates, below. The second one is for children who find writing more difficult so will appreciate the line being started for them. 

Then the directions are as follows:

1. Write a line about how fragile your refugee's heart is.

2. Write a line about what you see in his/her eyes.

3. Finish the line "Lost as..."

4. Write three adjectives that describe your refugee.

5. Your refugee is holding tightly onto something. What is it? Describe it.

6. What bad dreams does your refugee have at night?

7. What does your refugee long for?

8. If you could give your refugee one thing, what would it be? (If you like, you can specify here, 'Something it's in your power to give', in other words not a house or a thousand pounds, but a kind word or your friendship.)