Local 4 Global

The school wanted to focus on Local democracy, and different forms of government. We had ideas already, like doing sessions on Greek Art and different forms of Government in History/Geography.  We have been asking ourselves questions about our schooling. We invited HEC into the school for a week to develop the Global Dimension by using the UN Convention on the Rights of the child.Click here for a useful detailed children’s explanation.
We explored this through international examples i.e.  Janusz Korczak "Champion of the Child" We borrowed an exhibition about him from the Jewish Museum. You can borrow this exhibition, to display at your school. Phone the Jewish Museum on 020 7284 1997 We ended up creating a Christchurch Charter of Rights, listing the rights that the children would like to have in school.  

We looked at the students being Active Global Citizens, learning about international rights issues, e.g. The right to education, finding out about Save the Children UK’s ‘Rewrite the Future’ campaign. (39 million children living in conflict-affected fragile states are not going to school.) You can find out more and download a teacher’s resource pack from this webpage.

We had the students find out how you or your school can help by exploring what lobbying was then we lobbied our MP on this issue. We visited Contact your local MP to see who our MP was, then we looked to see if he had signed an Early day motion on East End Talking by visiting the Governments Early Day Motions webpage on EDUCATION IN CONFLICT STATES You can lobby too! 
See if your MP has signed then lobby him/her through Contact your local MP We wanted to find out more, so in groups the Year Six students worked out some questions. They then met the researcher of their local MP, George Galloway to find out more about the role of an MP and lobbied him on children's right to an education.

We even had time to discover What is voting? Years 3, 4 and 5 created fictional parties to show what they understood about voting.  They created different parties for people to vote for.  The parties were called: White Rose, Dragons, Balloon, Legends, Sunflower and Butterfly.
We finished the week with an Assembly to share what they had learned with the whole school.  See film clips and webpages of everything we did on the website East End Talking