In our training workshop yesterday, we spent time in break-out groups discussing possible activities we could organize to engage the refugee kids. The Ocalenie trainers asked each breakout group to prepare a simple plan for a hypothetical day at the “safe space for children” in Przemyśl. The plan was to include four phases: an opening activity followed by an active energy-release activity, followed by a calming, settle-down activity, followed finally with a closing activity. The trainers told us that we should be prepared to work with children ranging from about 4 to 12 years of age. They also told us, on a quiet day there may be as few as half a dozen children in the safe space, while on a busy day there might be around 40 kids. They also told us that during the height of the crisis in March and April, they regularly had over 100 kids in the safe space each day. The reception point offers services for up to 48 hours to each arriving refugee family, so kids often just spend one day and rarely more than two days in the safe space.
Based mainly on creative energy (since none of us is a professional childcare worker or has much background in working with groups of children), we thought it would be a good idea to start the day with a group ice-breaker activity where the kids would have a chance to at least learn each other’s names and get acquainted a little bit (since presumably they would not already know each other and there would be very high “churn” (turnover/attrition) day-to-day. One idea was to do a “show and tell” activity, where, upon arriving and registering into the safe space in the morning, each child would be asked to make a namecard for themselves (using any of the handicraft supplies available in the safe space — crayons, pens, paints, colored paper, glue, scissors, etc.), and also draw a picture showing themselves doing something they enjoy. Then, after all the kids have pretty much completed the activity, we could circle up (literally) and each child could take a turn showing everyone the name card they made and explaining what’s going on in the picture they drew. We voluneers could also participate in this activity — making fresh name cards for ourselves each day — but we’ll need to figure out how to deal with the language barrier, since most of us volunteers don’t speak Ukrainian or Russian.
The trainers also recommended that it’s a good idea to remind all the kids about the “house rules” during the opening activity. That’s certainly a good idea, but we’ll need to figure out some way to overcome the language barrier challenge for that one too.
After the ice-breaker, it’ll be time for some more lively activity. Some of the ideas we have for that are circle games like “Duck, Duck, Goose,” “Find the Lost Shoe,” “Musical Chairs,” etc. We also thought it might be fun for the children to play some more “open field” games like tag, “hide and seek” or “capture the flag”, but unfortunately we’re told that Ocalenie Foundation only has a single room available in the reception center, about 15 x 18 feet in size, and we’re not allowed to take children outside, so there really isn’t enough space to play sports or running games.
But there is a big-screen TV, and one of the volunteers mentioned she had once seen an entertaining yoga routine choreographed to teach kids various animal poses. As a yoga enthusiast myself, I thought that sounded like fun, so after the training session I spent some time searching online and, sure enough, I found a full series of videos to lead kids through various yoga routines with cute narrative stories to stimulate kids’ imaginations as they do the physical exercises.
For the quiet activity in the afternoon, reading stories, playing board games, working picture puzzles and playing with building blocks figured high on our list, as did arts and crafts such as drawing and painting. Since many of these refugee kids may eventually need to learn Polish (for those who stay in Poland) or English (for those who might ultimately be taken in by other countries around the world), it might be fun to lead them in making vocabulary practice flashcards. For example, for each card, the kids could draw a picture of one of the animals from the “yoga stories” on one side of the card and write the name of the animal in Ukrainian on the back of the card. Then we could show them how to write the Polish and English name too.
For the closing activity at the end of the day, we thought it might be nice to invite the kids to another group circle where we might sing a couple of songs together, and we might also invite the kids to show us the vocabulary flashcards they made.