Awareness campaign of 2016 in Don Bosco

Every year, the Center Don Bosco offers a free awareness campaign and this year I had the opportunity to help planning the activities and the whole project and I keep participating in the sessions of 1 hour or 1,5 hour. After having our more or less filled up calendar about the consulted hours with the schools, the learning process and fun could have started with the children of different schools. The fact that we received children aged between 7 and 15 years old incited changes in our activities in order to have as adecuate activities as possible for every ages counting on the differencies of interest in the different games and activities at every stage of our life.

This year's topic was the emotions what was a really good choice in my opinion because most children knew the new animated movie of 2015 called Inside Out. It was a good start because they might have been reflecting without realizing it what meant help in the collaboration.

Now that I have spoken about the less important things, I will give more details about the activities and how we organize one morning session.

Depending on the time of arrival of the school in question, we arrived half an hour before to check if we had prepared everything and if not, we prepared or fixed what we needed always sharing the tasks between us. In the last 5-10 minutes we are waiting for the arrival of children and when they enter, we start immediately with the first activity developed by Jessica and me(European volunteers) and consists of making a Photocall.

The children choose an emotion and after that we take a picture with the emotion displayed in their face; a little theater in the morning ..

The second activity takes place in another room where we settle calmly before we situate ourself and talk a little about the respect for others while they are talking and we also present a little bit the emotions by asking questions about them. It is important because then we can work with these informations what besides are their ideas about the definition and types of feelings.

Then we have different activities what are tailored to the needs of different ages.

With the little ones, we continue with divided groups talking about images and then we make a summary/overview because the opinion in a small group usually changes magically in front of the class. Here, often come out interesting things what we continue to work with to be able to offer some kind of solution (although it is not the primary goal) or to help tutors to work with it later.

Then we have an activity in which we choose positive and negative emotions and we define them by color, smell, shape and taste. Then we sing a little song dancing and very loudly so all the kids can leave the center happily and also it's good to make them move a little after thinking so much about emotions. As a last step, we give them a "magical" bracelet what helps them to control better their emotions.

The plan changes slightly with the older children. Interesting detailes can come out just by defining or talking about the emotions as our first activity but it is also true that their feelings and thoughts are more complex. We pretend to set the concept of the empathy and we try to help them with the control of the anger or rage what is even stronger.

In both cases there is the possibility of working one emotion in particular depending on the school but it doesn't mean that we don't raise an overview about the topic.

In my opinion, as a European volunteer ergo a participant and observer at the same time, I think it's a very good activity because it is not only about educating but also about fun and being European volunteers occasionally we can contribute interesting things on purpose or without it but anyway, it is a learning process not only for children but for us too.

And that's how European volunteers identificate with the awarness campaign about emotions.