Learning by playing
Valencian Community, Spain
Best practice - Play & leisure
On 1 June 2024, more than 130 boys and girls from the Local Children's and Adolescents' Councils of the Valencian Community met in La Pobla de Farnals (Spain) for the 8th Regional Meeting of Children's Local Councils to claim their right to play and reflect on the links with non-discrimination, climate action and protection against violence for children and adolescents.
To design the Regional Meeting, a committee of two boys and girls from each of the 12 participating municipalities was created. The work of this committee, from February to June, began with an internal consultation process in each local council: the boys and girls elected as representatives of their council were in charge of collecting the opinions of their council members and sharing them at the meetings of the committee. In that space, they worked to find consensus on key aspects of the Regional Meeting: What topic did they want to discuss? What type of activities did they want to develop? How did they want to present and spread their conclusions?
As a result, boys and girls decided that they wanted the Regional Meeting to be an opportunity to claim for their right to play and, at the same time, to serve as a tool to reflect on other issues that concern them: climate action, non-discrimination and protection against violence.
For an entire morning, children and adolescents occupied public space, a good part of it usually designated for car parking and road traffic, and actively exercised a key right: play. Through the different games proposed, and designed with adaptations that allowed reflection and debate, children expressed their opinions on issues such as what to do in situations of bullying, how the climate crisis affects them, how to resolve conflicts, the respect to different cultures and the importance of child participation. After a morning of playing in the streets, children had the opportunity to put their impressions on t-shirts in a funny workshop.
All the opinions and proposals were edited in the form of a manifesto and will be published soon. In addition, boys and girls expressed the will during the design phase of the Meeting that to “leave a mark” on this day in the municipality. Therefore the host town proposed a closing workshop to share all the proposals in a plenary session and to look for different slogans that would summarize them. Once these slogans were agreed upon, children worked as a team to create a total of eight cement tiles, with their footprint and their messages, which will be placed in one of the main squares of the town, with the purpose of spreading what happened there on June 1st and letting know all citizens what the concerns and proposals of the children and adolescents are.
